A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy(96)

With medication and therapy, my panic attacks eventually subsided. We went back to our lives—continuing to learn to live without Dylan, and with the knowledge of what he had done.





CHAPTER 18


The Wrong Question


Grief has a life cycle.

Many people have told me they started to emerge from the fog after about seven years, and that was true for me as well. By 2006, I was starting to feel better. I did not miss Dylan any less, and an hour did not pass where I did not think with pain and sadness about his victims and their families. But I wasn’t crying every day, or wandering through the world like a zombie. With the legal restrictions lifted, I began to wonder if I could help promote a better understanding of suicide by speaking out.

Through my work in suicide prevention, I’d met two other survivors of murder-suicide. It had helped us to talk to one another. Most suicide loss survivors struggle with grief, guilt, and humiliation, but when a family member commits murder in the last moments of his life, it changes him in your mind, and alters the way you grieve for him. You never stop asking if something you did caused him to behave as he did. The media attention can be traumatizing.

These other survivors of murder-suicide believed, as I did, that suicide had been a driving factor behind their loss, and yet the public persisted in seeing these acts exclusively as murders. We wanted to show that murder-suicide is a manifestation of suicide, and to help people to understand that suicide prevention is also murder-suicide prevention. So, when I found out the University of Colorado at Boulder was hosting a conference called “Violence Goes to College,” I decided to organize a panel discussion on murder-suicide.

Tom had found my immersion in the suicide prevention and loss community depressing, and he felt even more strongly about my murder-suicide research. (He called our panel the Addams Family.) I think he thought I was refusing to move on, and I sometimes wondered if he was right. I amassed a library of books about the adolescent brain, about suicide, murder-suicide, and the biology of violence, seeking out inconvenient truths and uncomfortable realities.

Part of it, perhaps, was penance; another part, self-protection. If I sought out the very worst, then it could never catch me unawares. Underneath it all, though, there was simply a compulsion to understand: How could Dylan, raised in our home, have done this?

? ? ?

I wanted to claim Dylan as my son. I wanted to stand up and tell people that as much grief and regret as I felt for those he had hurt and killed, he was still loved. Unfortunately, I wasn’t yet ready.

In the weeks leading up to my appearance on the panel, I went with a friend to see her daughter perform in a play at her college. It should have been a beautiful weekend, but being on campus with all those young people triggered something inside me. It was the first time I’d visited a college campus since I’d been to the University of Arizona with Dylan, and whenever I saw a tall, skinny boy enjoying college life, my heart would clutch.

Walking across the beautiful campus, I was jolted by a severe panic attack—my first since the spell I’d had during the depositions. I had another during the play we’d come to see, and another over dinner. Flipping through the channels in my hotel room while I was waiting for my friends to pick me up the next morning, I landed on I’ll Cry Tomorrow, the 1955 biopic of singer Lillian Roth. During Susan Hayward’s portrayal of Roth’s alcohol-induced nervous breakdown, I had a panic attack so acute I thought it would kill me.

That weekend began a terrible period. It was as if my brain had an accelerator spring stuck in the floored position. In previous periods of panic, I had focused on death, but this time I thought about fear. I became afraid of being afraid.

Anything could trigger an attack. Driving past the coroner’s office where they’d taken Dylan’s body: boom. Watching an old movie where a cowboy throws dynamite into a barn: boom. Red flowers on a bush: boom. My digestive system has always been my Achilles’ heel, and I became afraid to eat because of the constant intestinal upsets that came with the panic.

Because the attacks were triggered by anything that reminded me of Dylan’s death, my therapist felt they were a manifestation of post-traumatic stress disorder. She was clear about my course of treatment: I needed to take the tranquilizers a doctor had prescribed. But I was afraid of becoming addicted to them, and so I’d only take half a pill, or a quarter—enough to dull the edge of my anxiety but not enough to give me a true sense of well-being or to allow my racing mind to rest. Underneath it all, I felt as if my suffering indicated an essential character flaw. Cut it out, I thought viciously to myself. Get yourself together. You should be able to think your way out of this.

My therapist believed I wasn’t ready to appear on the panel. But I was compelled to follow through on my commitment, whatever the cost, and my compulsion to publicly represent “normalcy” made the pressure worse. I wanted to demonstrate that I wasn’t controlled by my fear. In trying to prove it, I created a trap for myself.

As the day of the panel approached, my panic attacks became more frequent and intense. One evening on my drive home, the sensations were so acute that I was sure I’d cause an accident. I had never had a truly suicidal thought before, but now I looked over at the passenger seat and thought: If there were a gun there, I would use it to make this stop. I clutched at the steering wheel and thought clearly to myself: This cannot go on.

I got through the panel presentation—with some help. On my therapist’s recommendation, a friend taped my answers so I could simply press Play if unable to speak. I ended up relying on the tape about half the time. It was a difficult day for everyone who appeared on the panel but a successful one nonetheless; the evaluations showed clearly that we’d made a real difference in the way people understood murder-suicide. One called it “a revelation.” Another went so far as to apologize to us for the way she’d thought about our cases before.