A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy(91)

In the aftermath of Dylan’s death, I entertained hundreds of fantasies about ways to atone for what Dylan had done. Finally, here it was. I didn’t have to trade my life in a terrorist attack to save a school bus filled with children. I could write a paragraph for a website, populate a spreadsheet, go around a ballroom putting programs on plates, pick a speaker up from the airport. The suicide loss community taught me that showing up in small and simple ways could save lives too.

I read every book and article I could get my hands on. I worked conferences so I could hear the speakers. I struggled through academic papers I found online, even when the summary was the only part I could understand. I watched webinars, pored over educational resources, asked lecturers for their PowerPoint slides so I could make sure I hadn’t missed anything. I asked as many questions as I could.

Eventually, the suicide loss community helped me to see that it was Dylan’s behavior—not mine—that had been pathological. In the process, though, I began to develop an activist’s passion. What had happened with Dylan was an outlier in terms of magnitude and scope and rarity. But it had also been part of a larger problem, one I hadn’t even realized was there.

At any given conference, I meet people who have lost someone close to them. Some of them come from families riddled through the generations with suicide, violent behavior, addiction, or other brain illnesses. Others have no known biological history at all. Many will have lost more than one close family member; others have survived their own attempts, and share their stories so others might learn. Some help the bereaved, while others work every single day to keep their loved ones or their patients alive. All of us are united under the same banner: It may be too late for the ones we have lost, but it may not be too late to save others.

Even as I found solidarity in this community, I stood apart. Coming to understand Dylan’s death as a suicide provided some degree of comfort for me, and I must admit part of me would have liked to stop there. But I was never foolish enough to delude myself that Dylan was the only one who had been lost on the day he took his own life.

Long after I came to accept Dylan’s depression and desire to die by suicide, I was still grappling with the reality of his violence. The person I saw raging on the Basement Tapes had been completely unrecognizable, a stranger in my son’s body. This person—raised in my home, the child I believed I had imbued with my values, whom I had taught to say please and thank you and to have a firm handshake—had killed other people, and planned even greater destruction.

Understanding his death as a suicide was an important first step. But it was only the beginning.





CHAPTER 17


Judgment


I try to find something that gives me a sense of peace and I can’t find one thing. Not writing, drawing, nature. I feel on the edge of disaster all the time. I’m still weeping over Dylan and hating myself for what he did. The image of him on the video is plastered on my brain. I feel as if his entire life and death are unresolved and I haven’t grieved yet or put any of this into perspective. Everything I think about to comfort myself is a double-edged sword.

—Journal entry, August 2003





Four years after Columbine, the date was set for our depositions. Finally, the nameless dread that had hung over us during four years of our grief had crystallized into an item on the calendar.

Our lawyers explained that a deposition was sworn out-of-court testimony that the plaintiffs could use to gather information for a lawsuit if the claims against us progressed to a trial by jury. Tom and I and the Harrises would each spend a day answering questions before a close-knit group of bereaved parents. We would sit, face to face, with the grieving parents of the children Dylan and Eric had murdered. I would see the sorrow in their eyes, and know my son was responsible for putting it there. The thought filled me with terror.

I had already resigned myself to financial disaster. The media had portrayed us as wealthy, in part because my grandfather had been a successful businessman. But he’d left his estate to a charitable foundation, and our home, which looked like a massive compound from the aerial shots that appeared on TV, had been a fixer-upper. So we’d lose our home and have to declare bankruptcy. What was that in comparison to what we’d already been through?

The depositions would be difficult, but once they were done—whatever the outcome—at least they’d be over.

? ? ?

Dream made me cry all the way to work. Dylan was a baby, about the size of a doll. I was trying to find a way to lay him down, but there was nowhere safe to put him. I was in a dormitory and found a room full of drawers like a morgue or mausoleum. All the women in the room had a place to put their babies. But I had neglected to put a name on a drawer for him, so there was no place to lay him down. He was tired and needed to rest but I had not managed to make a safe place for him to go.

—Journal entry, April 2003



We were already widely blamed, but the depositions would be the decisive appraisal of our competence as parents. Ultimately our fate would rest in the hands of people who hadn’t known our son, and who hadn’t interacted with us as a family. It didn’t take an outside committee to make me feel I had failed Dylan. Each day I cataloged hundreds of things I wished I had done differently.

It seemed highly likely we would be held responsible. On the Basement Tapes, Dylan and Eric were blatantly homicidal and suicidal, whipping weapons around like toys. Tom and I had recognized Dylan’s room in one segment, so the weapons had been in our home at least one night. The intensity of our son’s rage on the tapes made the entire family seem culpable. What could possibly be said to prove his violent tendencies had been hidden? Although it was the truth, I couldn’t see how anyone would believe it. I barely believed it myself.