A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy(42)

One of the students I worked with when I was still at the community college shared with me one of the most difficult things about living with her disability.

“Everyone sees the disability first. To them, I’m an amputee before I’m a person,” she told me.

At the time, I was grateful to her for the insight because I knew it would help me in my work. After Columbine, though, I knew exactly what she meant. I was certain I would always be seen as the woman who raised a murderer, and that no one—including me—would ever see me as anything else.

? ? ?

Though I was fifty years old, in the months after Columbine I felt keenly the loss of my own parents. I was grateful they hadn’t lived to see what my life had become but longed, childlike, for the simple reassurance of their presence.

My father died when I was eighteen, but I was thirty-eight when I lost my mother, and I relied on her long after I became an adult. At her funeral, my siblings and I referred to her as the North Star, a tribute to her unerring gift for helping us to find our bearings in life even in the most turbulent of circumstances. I suspect that is why, in the months and years after Columbine, I dreamed about her almost as often as I dreamed about Dylan.

In one dream I had soon after the tragedy, it was night and a cold wind was blowing. I was searching for my car in an enormous parking lot while clutching Dylan, about two years old, in my arms. I tried to wrap a blanket around him to keep him warm as I walked up and down the rows looking for the car in increasing desperation, but huge, heavy shopping bags filled with papers hung from my arms. These made it so difficult to carry Dylan that I worried I would drop him onto the pavement.

Just as he was beginning to slip from my grasp, my mother stepped forward. She said, “Give me the bags. You take care of your son.” One by one, she lifted the heavy handles cutting into my wrists and arms, allowing me to hold Dylan tightly, and wrap the blanket securely around him. I found our car and placed Dylan safely in his car seat while my mother stood by, holding the bags she’d taken from me. Then I woke up.

The dream revealed the path I needed to follow. The papers in the bags represented everything pulling me away from my grief: worry about the lawsuits, money concerns, fear of seeing my name in the newspapers, the thousands of letters and bills and notices and legal documents taking over our den in enormous drifts of fear and obligation. It was easy for me to get overwhelmed by the constant media assault, the world’s hatred and blame, not to mention my constant anxiety that something terrible would happen to Byron. Our financial situation emerged as completely disastrous, and so complicated that it seemed we would never dig ourselves out of the hole.

But my mother was right. I had to focus on grieving for Dylan and his victims, and let go of everything else.

That was difficult. Even if I hadn’t been incapacitated by grief, the sheer administrative weight of what we were dealing with would have overwhelmed me. A month after the tragedy, Tom and I were still wandering the rooms of our empty house like ghosts, dazed by loss and remorse, haunted by the same circular thoughts. I miss Dylan. How could he do such a horrible thing? I can’t believe I’ll never see him again. How could someone I loved so much murder people in cold blood? Other children? If only I’d known, said the magic words, done whatever it took to stop him. How could he have done such a thing?

And then, always, always, the impossibility and permanence of the loss: How can it be possible I will never again feel his scratchy cheek against mine?

Periodically, we’d be jolted back into a kind of frenetic energy—if not by a renewed realization of what Dylan had done, then by the myriad ways the ramifications of his actions would destroy the home and the life and the family we’d spent twenty-seven years building. Though Gary Lozow significantly discounted his legal services, the first bill we received shocked us into reality. We had absolutely no idea how we would pay it. In that instance, my mother stepped forward from the grave to help us. Before she died in 1987, when the boys were small, she bought life insurance policies for both of them. Dylan’s two policies were paid out to us after his death, and they exactly covered the amount of that first bill.

It was only a drop in the bucket, though, and there would be years of legal bills ahead. Tom tried to find consulting work in the oil field, but there were few opportunities, and those that did come up disappeared quickly when potential investors learned he was the father of one of the shooters in the Columbine tragedy.

Our insurance company took some time to decide whether they would cover our legal expenses at all. When they finally agreed to, we learned they wouldn’t cover our working with Gary. This was devastating, as he’d come to feel more like a trusted friend than an attorney—an oasis of sanity in the madness. Starting over with outsiders was emotionally difficult, but our new attorneys, Frank Patterson and Gregg Kay, were compassionate and patient with us as we showed them family photos and talked about our lives with Dylan. I needed to feel they knew us as a family, that they knew Dylan. Before long, we grew comfortable with them.

Even with their help, each day brought a mountain of incomprehensible paperwork and decisions made more distressing because we couldn’t fully understand their implications. Everybody was suing somebody else. There were lawsuits against Dylan’s friend Robyn, who’d bought three of the four guns; and Mark Manes, who’d sold them the other one. There were lawsuits against the companies that manufactured the guns, and against the company that made Eric’s antidepressant medication. There were lawsuits against the sheriff’s department, the county, and the police. Thirty-six lawsuits would ultimately be filed against us. Our lawyers were meticulous, and did their best to explain what was going on, but the complexity of our legal situation was far beyond my ability to grasp it.