A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy(46)

For twenty years, signing permission slips and designing elaborate Easter egg hunts and making sure my boys had sneakers that fit had been the touchstones of my life, around which I had fit my work and my art and my marriage. Now I had to ask: What had the point of any of it been?

It’s probably impossible to raise a child without having regrets. After murder-suicide, the guilt and second-guessing are constant, intolerable companions. When I went home from work at night, I paged obsessively through our family photo albums. There were the trips to the dairy farm, the natural history museum, the park—the ordinary stuff of a happy middle-class childhood. I was relieved to see how often in the photos Dylan was hugged, tickled, cuddled, or otherwise touched with love. I daydreamed about buttonholing strangers on the street and showing them the albums. There, I wanted to say. See? I’m not crazy. Look at how happy we were!

But the sight of Dylan’s arm, casually slung around Tom’s neck while he grinned and called out to me behind the camera, would once again tap in to that seemingly endless river of sorrow.

In the old movie Gaslight, the Charles Boyer character is trying to drive his wife, who is played by Ingrid Bergman, insane. He moves artwork and jewelry, and plants items he claims she’s “stolen” in her purse. It works: when his wife can no longer trust her own perceptions of reality, she begins to break down. I thought of Gaslight often in those days, as I tried to reconstruct an identity for myself. I had thought I’d been a good mother. I had loved and been proud of my son. Nothing I saw when Dylan was alive made me think he was suffering from problems of any real magnitude. Nor, looking back, could I see any obvious, screaming signs. The cognitive dissonance was intense.

When you’re a good parent, you just sort of know what your kids are up to. The teacher’s comment stung me more than hateful invective would have—not because I didn’t believe it, but because I did.

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Tom mostly wonders if we will ever be reunited with him. This is on Tom’s mind constantly. He says he’d feel comforted if he knew he’d see him again. I think a lot about where Dylan is and whether his evil actions prevent him from resting in peace, in God’s care. I hope there is a forgiving God who will recognize that he was a child.

—Journal entry, May 1999



My friend Sharon lost a child to suicide, and she urged me to find a suicide loss survivors’ support group.

I was desperate to be among people who would listen and sympathize and not judge, but I could not imagine walking into a room filled with strangers and talking about what Dylan and Eric had done. More to the point, as Gary Lozow had pointed out, if our lawsuits went to trial, another support group participant might have to serve as a witness. I felt I had caused enough damage already.

The isolation was terrible. My anxiety levels were sky-high, and I felt very disconnected. We were not in communication with the Harrises. The one person in the world who might have been able to understand what I was going through was Tom, but the divide that had sprung up between us in the earliest days after the tragedy continued to widen.

This is not unusual, of course. Although the statistics you’ve heard about the likelihood of divorce after the death of a child are probably inflated, most marriages do suffer immense disruption. One often-cited reason is that women and men may grieve the loss differently: men tend to grieve the loss of the person the child would have become, while women tend to grieve the child they remember.

That divide was true for us. I incessantly reviewed memories of Dylan as a baby, a toddler, a child, and a teenager, while Tom focused on everything Dylan would never do because he was dead. This focus on Dylan’s lost future chafed me, as if Tom were pressuring Dylan posthumously to fill his fatherly expectations. The things we fought about seem unimportant to me now. We were lashed together, back to back, at the center of this terrible storm, but sometimes it felt worse to be with someone than to be alone.

Our coping mechanisms were often in conflict, too. I had always been more social and extroverted, while Tom preferred solitude. The tragedy exaggerated our respective orientations. As stressful as it was to expose myself to hatred and judgment, my reemergence into the world at large exposed me to kindness and generosity, too. Interacting with other people also meant my denial could not become entrenched. An unpleasant conversation might hurt my feelings and set me back temporarily, but ultimately I believed engaging with the outside world was helping me to come to terms with reality.

While I was pushing myself to get back out in the world, though, Tom was becoming increasingly private. I wanted to throw open the doors, and Tom wanted to circle the wagons. More and more, I found I was leaving him to it.

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I sang sad songs and cried all the way to work. I could barely walk. I moved in slow motion. The words “Sometimes I feel like I’m almost gone” described how I felt. I got to work, sat at my desk and cried. I thought I might go home because I didn’t feel like working, then realized that home would be worse. Somehow, I eased into my work day and eventually the weight lifted and I began to concentrate on work.

—Journal entry, August 1999



My life split into two hemispheres: the grinding tumult of my personal life, and the quiet order of work.

My concentration grew. Every once in a while, for a minute or two or five or fifteen, I’d become absorbed enough to forget what I was grappling with. Those moments, when they happened, were a gift. Not only did they provide me with respite, but they connected me with the person I’d been before the tragedy: a reliable, capable person who could make a difference.