A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy(51)
Dylan talks about sneaking his newly purchased shotgun into our house. He had sawed off the end, making it smaller and easier to conceal—not to mention illegal to own. He describes his tension as he held the gun inside his coat and slipped up to his room without being suspected. We’ve never learned whether the gun was stored inside our home or elsewhere. It might have been kept inside his box-shaped headboard; the inside could not be accessed unless the bed was taken apart. Watching, I felt hopeless. Even if we had continued to search his room, as we did regularly for six months after his arrest in junior year, we probably would not have looked there.
At one point on the tape, Dylan makes a derogatory comment about my extended family, and another about his older brother, Byron. We had been grieving for six full months, and nobody had borne the brunt of the world’s venom more bravely than Byron had. Our older son had stepped up and shouldered the terrible responsibilities that had landed on him with astonishing grace and courage. It was ironic. Dylan had so little to complain or be angry about that he was reduced to grasping at straws like his relationship with his brother or rarely seen relatives in order to stoke the rage Eric needed him to sustain.
In another snippet of tape, Dylan complains to Eric that I am making him participate in a Passover seder. On the weekend they made the video, I had decided to make a traditional Passover dinner and invite a neighbor to join us, and I asked both of my sons for their work schedules so I could plan accordingly. Dylan responded in a way I found immature and self-centered. He didn’t want to participate. The youngest person at the table has to read part of the service, and he found it embarrassing.
I asked him to reconsider. “I know this holiday means nothing to you, but it means something to me. We’ll have a good dinner. Do it for me?” When he said he would, I thanked him and told him I appreciated it. Then there he was on the video, complaining to Eric about his obligation to attend.
Eric, who is playing with a gun while Dylan talks, becomes very still and silent when he hears the word “Passover.” He hadn’t known my family was Jewish. When Dylan realizes what he has let slip, he starts backpedaling. He seems afraid of Eric’s reaction, and tells him I’m not really Jewish—just a quarter, or an eighth. I couldn’t tell if he was worried about being judged, or being shot.
Eric finally breaks the tension by offering a word of consolation to Dylan. Watching it, I thought, You stupid idiots! All this talk about hating everyone and everything, and you don’t even know what you’re talking about. It’s all something you’ve invented in your minds to sustain your anger. The heartbreaking thing was that, for a moment there, it seemed like Dylan had almost realized it.
At one point on the tapes, Eric suggests they each say something about their parents. At that, Dylan looks down at his fingernails and says, almost inaudibly, “My parents have been good to me. I don’t want to browse there.” Neither one of them acknowledges a connection between the actions they are planning and the pain they will cause the people who love them. In another recording, they go so far as to announce that their parents and friends hold no responsibility for what is about to happen, as if tidying this minor detail will make everything fine for their families when it’s all over.
The last segment was the shortest one. It was also the most difficult for me. In it, the boys pause to say a few words of farewell before going over to the school to carry out their plan. Supplies are piled around them, as if they are heading out on an expedition. Eric tells his family how they should distribute his possessions.
Dylan does not utter an angry word or speak of hatred or vengeance. He makes no mention of the death and destruction to come. There is none of the braggadocio of the previous tapes. He does not cry, either; his affect is flat, resigned. Whatever else he intends to do, he is going to the school to end his own life. He looks away from the camera, as if speaking only to himself. Then he says softly, “Just know I’m going to a better place. I didn’t like life too much….”
Watching this, I had to bite my lip to stop myself from screaming, Stop! Stop! Don’t go. Don’t leave me! Don’t do this. Don’t hurt those people. Give me a chance to help you! Come back. But wherever he was, Dylan couldn’t hear me anymore.
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Tufekci: “I can see no benefit whatsoever to releasing those tapes, only the possibility for great harm.”
—Notes from a conversation with sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, February 2015
Years later, Tom and I would fight to make sure the so-called Basement Tapes were not released to the public.
We encountered a lot of resistance. People believed we were hiding something, or protecting Dylan’s reputation. (As I drily commented to Tom the first time we heard that particular accusation, “I think that horse has already left the barn.”) I was even challenged by some survivors of suicide loss: “Don’t you think making the tapes public would help people to understand why this happened?”
The answer was No, I don’t. I still don’t—and my reasons are closely interwoven with many of the broader, global issues surrounding suicide and violence at the heart of this book: specifically, the real fear that another disturbed child would use the tapes as a blueprint or a model for their own school shooting.
Dylan and Eric had already been, in certain quarters, heralded as champions for a cause. Tom and I had received chilling letters from alienated kids expressing admiration for Dylan and what he’d done. Adults who had been bullied as children wrote to tell us they could relate to the boys and their actions. Girls flooded us with love letters. Young men left messages on our answering machine calling Dylan a god, a hero. An acquaintance working at a youth correctional facility told me some of the imprisoned boys cheered as they watched television coverage of the destruction at the school. A video project Dylan and Eric had made, leaked to the media, had become a rallying cry for bullied kids.