A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy(88)
In the months after Columbine, everyone who lived in the area felt exposed and frightened. The whole place was a bundle of raw nerves, and people responded in all kinds of ways. Some tapped in to a vein of forgiveness and compassion. Others lashed out. Many who’d never had a voice before gained a sense of power and importance. Some were seduced by it; others genuinely felt they could do some good by speaking out.
Blame swirled. Too many guns were the problem, said one faction. There hadn’t been enough guns, said another; every teacher should be armed. A lack of family values was to blame, shouted the Religious Right. Still others claimed that the Religious Right had co-opted the community’s mourning. Amid all this, people were trying to mourn the dead and heal the injured, while scrambling to rebuild a sense of community, a sense of safety, a sense of self.
The natural response to tragedy is to look for meaning: How could this happen? Who is responsible? Tom and I were the chief suspects. “Those boys could only have learned hate like that in their homes,” editorials thundered. The things people wrote and said were painful to us, but we were far from the only ones to find the climate divisive.
Like porcupines, people roll into a ball to protect their soft centers, projecting their spikes outward. This defensive mode is a natural response to being attacked, and there were a lot of spikes in Littleton in those days. The school, the media, the police—everyone involved seemed to be simultaneously fending off an attack while launching one of their own.
The sheriff’s department was doing meticulous work, but the public was learning they had also failed to follow through on Judy and Randy Brown’s repeated warnings about Eric. His website was quoted extensively in the search warrants served on the day of the massacre, proving someone in the department had known about it. One claim had even been pursued: when investigators had found evidence that Eric was building pipe bombs, they drew up a warrant to search the Harris house. But the warrant was never taken before a judge, the house was never searched, and the investigation report did not surface until long after the tragedy.
As the public lost confidence in the sheriff’s department, people began to demand more information. The autopsy report of a minor is usually sealed, but the most important findings—that there had been no drugs in Dylan’s system, for instance—had already been released. I did not see what anyone had to gain from knowing what was in his stomach when he died, or how much his organs weighed. Even with our lawyers’ help, we lost that fight, and the autopsy results were picked over and published. I felt sick. Even in this, we had failed to protect Dylan.
The media swarm had receded somewhat, but there was still a Columbine-related headline on the front page of the local news almost every day. Some reporters were digging into the ongoing investigation, and trying to get a real understanding of the dynamics at the school. Others were less ethical. When Columbine crime scene photos of Eric and Dylan lying dead in pools of blood were sold to the National Enquirer and published, it seemed there was no line that couldn’t be crossed. Later, though, I would learn that many journalists had also been traumatized by the time they spent in Littleton.
Meanwhile, Tom and I were sitting in the eerily silent eye of the storm. Even while our own inner circle continued to be an immense source of strength (and an insulation from the hostility of the outside world), the tension in our own relationship was rising. It would only get worse as the sense of solace and purpose I found in the company of other suicide loss survivors grew.
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My friend Sharon was a survivor of suicide loss herself, and knew I needed to connect with other parents who had lost children to suicide. She also knew that my organizational skills make me a natural coordinator and administrator, the type of person you automatically ask to plan a meeting, or balance a budget, or type up minutes. So, in that second year after Columbine, Sharon put me to work. She invited me to join a small group of women who volunteered for the Suicide Prevention Coalition of Colorado.
Walking into the first meeting, I was scared sick. Would these people judge me? I didn’t dare to hope they’d understand what Dylan had done, let alone what I had experienced. Ten minutes later, I was sitting around a kitchen table with five other mothers of children lost to suicide, tying raffia bows onto flowerpots containing forget-me-not seed packets. There was no discrimination in that room—nothing but love, and compassion, and an all-too-recognizable grief. (Three of the six women at the table—half—would also survive breast cancer, which strengthened my admittedly unscientific theory about what happens when a bomb goes off in your heart.) The tension I usually felt in the company of others melted away. The opportunity to grieve for Dylan as my son, no matter what he had done in the final moments of his life, was valuable beyond description.
I recently read an article in the New York Times by a therapist, Patrick O’Malley. He describes the respite one of his patients found at a support group for bereaved parents, despite her initial resistance. The group was “a place where no acting was required. It was a place where people understood that they didn’t really want to achieve closure after all. To do so would be to lose a piece of a sacred bond.” When I was with other survivors, Dylan was a boy who had died by suicide. Nobody was excusing what he had done, but they weren’t discounting my grief, either, or my right to miss the son I had lost.
The next weekend, I attended a luncheon hosted by the Suicide Prevention Coalition of Colorado, the group Sharon chaired; our forget-me-nots were on the tables. For the first time, I was in a room filled with people who could relate to all my feelings, the ones that made me feel like I was hanging on to sanity by the merest thread.