A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy(58)
The desire for suicide, then, comes from the first two. The ability to go through with it comes from the third. Over the years, this insight would prove important to me.
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I finally started to read some of his journal pages. He was expressing depressed and suicidal thoughts a full 2 years before his death. I couldn’t believe it. We had all that time to help him and didn’t. I read his writings and cried and cried. This was like the suicide note we never got. A sad, heart-wrenching day.
—Journal entry, June 2001
From the day the tragedy occurred, we had been desperate for information about Dylan’s state of mind when he died. He had purposely left nothing behind, and law enforcement had emptied his room of anything of relevance, so there was little to study. After nearly two years, we had come to accept we would never know what he had experienced during the last months of his life. Then, in 2001, Kate Battan’s office called. The sheriff’s department had pages of Dylan’s writing in their possession, and offered to share copies with us.
These writings are always referred to as “journals,” but really these were scattered pages, compiled by the investigators after the fact. Most of them were taken from Dylan’s school notebooks, although some of the bits and pieces of paper he wrote on were old advertising flyers or other scraps, which he then tucked into various binders and books. The stack of photocopied pages was about half an inch thick. Some entries were a sentence long, while others went on for pages.
What I found in Dylan’s writing was a revelation. I had not known he had expressed his thoughts and feelings in writing at all, as I did, and it made me feel close to him. The entries themselves broke my heart. I know how deceptive self-recording can be. I often spill pages and pages when I am sad or scared or angry, whereas better times rate only a breezy line or two. I also know that people can say things in their diaries they don’t have any real plans to act on: I swear, I’m going to kill Joe if he doesn’t return my weed whacker. Even with that caveat, Dylan’s anguish—his depression, perceived isolation, longing, and desperation—jumps off the page.
He talks about cutting himself, a sign of severe distress. He writes about suicide in the very earliest pages: “Thinking of suicide gives me hope that i’ll be in my place wherever i go after this life—that ill finally not be at war w. myself, the world, the universe—my mind, body, everywhere, everything at PEACE—me—my soul (existence)” and often afterward: “oooh god I want to die sooo bad…such a sad desolate lonely unsalvageable I feel I am…not fair, NOT FAIR!!! Let’s sum up my life…the most miserable existence in the history of time.” He talks about dying by suicide for the first time a full two years before Columbine, and many more times after that.
There is despair and anger but little violence, especially in the pages before January 1999. Besides sadness, the most common emotion expressed throughout Dylan’s journals—and by far the most prevalent word—is “love.” There are pages covered in huge, hand-drawn hearts. He writes, heartbreakingly and sometimes eloquently, about his unfulfilled, excruciating desire for romantic love and understanding. “A dark time, infinite sadness,” he wrote. “I want to find love.” He fills pages with details of a passionate, painful infatuation with a girl who does not even know he exists.
The two psychological states Joiner points to as components in the desire to die—thwarted belongingness (“I am alone”) and perceived burdensomeness (“I am a burden”)—are painfully apparent, although he kept both his hurt and his infatuation closely guarded. I pushed back for years against the public perception of Dylan as an outcast, because he had close friends (not only in Eric, but also in Zack and Nate), and because he participated in a wider circle of boys and girls. But—and it is vital for every survivor of suicide loss to understand this about the person who has died—the journals revealed a vast chasm between our perception of his reality and Dylan’s own perception of it.
He had friends, but he did not feel as if he belonged. In one journal entry he lists his “nice family” among the good things in his life, but the hugeness of our love for him could not penetrate the fog of his desolation. He understood himself as a burden, although we never once felt he was. (Tom and I did worry aloud about how we would pay for his college tuition, which haunts me to this day.) He expresses anger at a world where he does not fit, is not understood. At the beginning, the anger is directed mostly at himself. Gradually, it turns outward.
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I thought it might be helpful to have a distillation of a few points.
1. Nothing you did or didn’t do caused Dylan to do what he did.
2. You didn’t “fail to see” what Dylan was going through—he was profoundly secretive and deliberately hid his internal world not only from you, but from everyone else in his life.
3. By the end of his life, Dylan’s psychological functioning had deteriorated to the point that he was not in his right mind.
4. Despite his deterioration, his former self survived enough to spare at least four people during the attack.
—E-mail from Dr. Peter Langman, February 9, 2015
That Dylan was seriously depressed is not up for debate. A posthumous diagnosis is, of course, impossible, yet some experts believe the problem may have been more serious.
His journals are difficult to understand, and not simply because Dylan’s handwriting was so poor. Toward the end of his life, he wrote things like “When I’m in my human form, knowing that I’m going to die, everything has a touch of triviality to it.” A statement like this implies that, at least part of the time, he did not feel human. It was as if being human was out of his reach: “made a human, without the possibility of BEING human.”