A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy(45)

I took copious notes, but no productivity trick could compensate for the deficit. My face still burns when I remember the first meeting I led after the tragedy. I asked everyone to go around in a circle to introduce themselves and say a little about what they did. When the room fell silent, I unwittingly invited them to go around the circle and introduce themselves—again. The sideways glances and uncomfortable seat-shifting alerted me to my mistake, but there was nothing to do but stumble through my apology.

It took a long time for me to return to a full schedule. In the same way my evening walks were helping me to rebuild my physical strength, so did I have to regain the emotional capacity to be around others. Work was a rehabilitation of sorts, a safe environment where I could rebuild my identity and work through my unique grief experience. The families of the victims were always on my mind, especially how difficult it must have been for them to try to resume some semblance of a normal life after what Dylan had done.

As time went by, my constant anguish began to feel almost comical. Stashed handkerchiefs dropped out of notepads, calendars, sleeves, and my pockets when I stood up. I could always be relied upon to provide a Kleenex pack. Seasonal allergies? Ask Sue.

I hoped for kindness, and for the most part I got it, more than I felt I deserved. But not everyone was kind and understanding, and that was okay too. The denial I had been living in—especially the belief that Dylan had been coerced into participating, or that he hadn’t directly committed any of the violence—was a natural response, but it was no longer appropriate. Being back in the world meant confronting the enormity of what Dylan had done.

I sensed judgment and anger and pain from some of the people I worked with. Friends told me when someone spoke unkindly behind my back. Some people avoided me, or confronted me indirectly. One of these incidents stands out in my mind, not because it was the worst confrontation, or the most devastating comment anyone made, but because it articulated exactly what I feared everyone was thinking, not to mention my own worst fears about myself.

I went along on a monitoring visit of a vocational program our office had funded in a small rural high school outside Denver. Being in a high school was difficult for me, and I fought tears the entire visit, especially when we stepped into a large computer lab where a group of happy, productive kids were working.

We introduced ourselves to the computer teacher, a young man not much older than his students, and congratulated him on the thriving program. When I said my name, he stared into my face with intensity. When one of our team members complimented his ability to keep so many machines in good working order, he said, “Well, you get to know the machines. After a while, it’s like being a good parent.” At that, he turned away from the person who’d asked the question so he could make searing eye contact with me. “When you’re a good parent, you just sort of know what your kids are up to.”

Those experiences hurt, and I hated them. But as much as I wanted to flee whenever the topic of Columbine surfaced, I could not spend my life walking out of meetings to avoid comments I did not want to hear, or not going to them at all so I’d never encounter a situation that might cause me distress. Despite the horrendous maelstrom of emotions I was living with, I wasn’t the only one hurting. I had to face the magnitude of Dylan’s actions, and accept how his terrible, violent choices had affected others. Each time I recovered from an uncomfortable encounter, I took another step toward accepting the totality of what Dylan had done. Whether people supported or judged me, being back to work put me shoulder to shoulder with the community my son tried to destroy.

I’d always been conscious of the opinions of others; suddenly, their approval was paramount. I felt sure my own behavior was being evaluated and judged and used to explain how Dylan could have killed and maimed. Always mildly obsessive about my work, I entered a period of intense perfectionism. I would make no errors, commit no miscommunication. I would catch every typo; do every project better than I needed to do it and with time to spare. It wasn’t enough to be competent, or normal; I had to convince others I had not caused the craziness exhibited by my son. If I did make a small mistake, I’d often become too upset to continue working. Whenever someone asked me a question, I felt criticized. Driving, I worried I’d accidentally injure or kill someone in my distraction, cementing the world’s conviction that I didn’t deserve to draw breath.

I looked at photographs of other people’s happy families on their desks and wondered: What did they do, that I didn’t? At the same time, I felt defensive and desperate to show people Dylan had been loved, that I’d been a good mother—and that, despite our closeness, I’d had no idea what he was planning or the slightest suspicion he was capable of such a barbaric act.

Of course, I was assigning to others all the negative feelings I had about myself. I had raised a murderer without knowing it, a person with such a faulty moral compass that he’d committed an atrocity. I was a fool, a sucker, a dolt. I hadn’t even been one of those cool parents who smokes pot with their kids or introduces them to their groovy boyfriends. No, I’d been an “everybody sits down for family dinner” kind of a parent, an “I want to meet your friends and their parents before you spend the night at their house” kind of a parent. What good had it done?

I remembered driving a kindergarten-aged Dylan back to the grocery so he could return a piece of penny candy he’d taken without paying for it, and how grateful I’d been when the manager soberly accepted Dylan’s apology and took the candy from his small hand instead of rewarding his theft by allowing him to keep it. I thought of all the times I’d called the mom hosting a sleepover to find out what movie she was planning to show. More than once, I’d asked for a less violent selection. Why had I bothered trying to establish a contextual framework for violence, when the whole world could see how miserably I failed to protect my son and so many others from it?