A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy(76)
I’ve talked to the friends Dylan spent time with that summer many times since then. I’ve asked point-blank if they saw signs of depression or rage, but Dylan’s behavior seemed as normal to them as it did to us. Some of his sillier moments were caught on film. Devon’s sixteenth birthday party had a luau theme, and she gave me a photo of Dylan in the lurid Hawaiian shirt and straw hat she’d lent him for the occasion. Underneath, she wrote: “He hated it, I could tell, but he put it on anyway.” She goes on to describe how much he ate.
Nate slept over often. The two of them would stay up until nothing was on television but infomercials. They’d turn the volume down and make up dialogue to accompany the sales pitches, laughing so hard they’d give themselves stomachaches. Then the two of them would raid the kitchen. They ate Polish sausage, apple crisp, doughnuts, and ploughed through chips and salsa by the ton. Tom used to say we should buy stock in Oreos.
Despite this apparent normalcy, in the journal entry dated August 10, Dylan writes a passionate and secret final good-bye to the girl he secretly has a crush on—one suicide note in a journal filled with them.
Days before the start of Dylan’s senior year, he was hired to do tech support at a computer store. He willingly accepted the store’s dress code, a collared shirt and black pants, and worked eleven hours on his first day, arriving home tired and proud. Tom and I noted that Dylan’s long day was likely the first of many if he chose a career in computers.
As the fall approached, incoming seniors at Columbine High School were asked to submit pictures for the yearbook. A local photographer shrewdly suggested Dylan ask a friend to the session to help him loosen up, so Zack tagged along, and I loved the shots the photographer took of Dylan looking relaxed and happy among the pink rocks in the valley not far from our home. One of those photos would later be featured on the cover of Time magazine, under the headline “The Monsters Next Door.”
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As Dylan began his senior year, life settled down for the whole family.
Tom and I were cautiously optimistic and proud when Byron finally landed a job he loved at a car dealership. His supervisors were mature, encouraging mentors, as eager to teach him about the business as he was to learn. He moved nearby to be closer to work, so we saw him more often, and Tom and I watched with growing pleasure as our older son seemed to grow up overnight. He even adopted a kitten, and I was touched to see what a loving and nervous new dad he was.
That job would prove to be a turning point in Byron’s life, the place where he transitioned into manhood and became the hardworking, responsible, thriving adult he is today.
Tom and I purchased a second rental property downtown and rented the studio outbuilding on our property. The additional income alleviated our money worries, though we still didn’t know how we’d manage Dylan’s college expenses. Most important, Tom finally found a combination of medications to give him some relief from his chronic pain. He still had a few surgeries to go through, but he could do much more than he’d been able to.
I’d settled into my new job, too, and enjoyed the freedom granted by my four-day workweek. With more time to cook, I shamelessly used food as a lure to get the family together. I made beef stew and lasagna; the gloppy, layered Mexican casseroles both boys loved; Dylan’s favorite pumpkin spice cake; and tapioca pudding by the vat. I put up triple batches: one to eat, one to freeze so I could get something on the table in a hurry, and the last so I’d have something extra to send home with Byron. Sunday dinner with the whole family happened almost every week. Byron and Dylan staged epic dish-towel-flicking fights in the kitchen; though they looked like grown men, they were really still boys.
I also had time to concentrate on my art. I’d always loved the technical challenge of translating a three-dimensional world into two dimensions, and over the years I’d taken the occasional class and sporadically attended figure drawing sessions on Saturday morning with my friends. But between raising my family, running a household, and work, months would go by sometimes without an afternoon free.
Certainly, I’d never before hit a creative groove the way I did that year. I could lose myself for hours in a drawing or a painting, thinking of nothing but how to more faithfully translate the colors and shapes I saw in nature onto the paper in front of me.
My journals from those days are filled with the issues preoccupying me: chalky whites, muddy colors, tricky shadows, composition, detail, and form. After Columbine, convinced my trivial preoccupations had blinded me to Dylan’s distress and plans, it would be years until I could make art again.
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11/5 Tom is having outpatient hand surgery tomorrow.
11/6 We were at the hospital til 5, then we began our slow trek home through traffic. We stopped for Chinese takeout and medication. We were glad that Dylan stayed home so we could actually eat dinner with him. His car is broken so he was stuck here until a friend picked him up at about 9 to go to a movie. I want so much to be closer to him, but he is absent so much of the time. This is such an important time. He really needs to be planning for his future but he just isn’t moving ahead. At least he was pleasant tonight and ate with us.
11/9 Dylan was cute and pleasant today and actually talked about wanting to go to school in Arizona to escape the weather.
The previous year’s problems appeared to be behind Dylan. He could be moody and irritable, but what teenager isn’t? Sometimes we noted that he was tired, but the computer store job required a lot of hours, and he was taking calculus, advanced video production, English, and psychology, on top of an early morning bowling class.