Even with their help, each day brought a mountain of incomprehensible paperwork and decisions made more distressing because we couldn’t fully understand their implications. Everybody was suing somebody else. There were lawsuits against Dylan’s friend Robyn, who’d bought three of the four guns; and Mark Manes, who’d sold them the other one. There were lawsuits against the companies that manufactured the guns, and against the company that made Eric’s antidepressant medication. There were lawsuits against the sheriff’s department, the county, and the police. Thirty-six lawsuits would ultimately be filed against us. Our lawyers were meticulous, and did their best to explain what was going on, but the complexity of our legal situation was far beyond my ability to grasp it.
To be honest, although the lawyers were exercised about it, my own feeling was: Who cares? To the extent that the lawsuits would provide a parent with the money to take care of a grievously wounded child, I was glad for them. But the lawsuits wouldn’t give parents their children back. They wouldn’t return Dave Sanders, the teacher who had been shot, to his family. Lawsuits wouldn’t give us the opportunity to do a thousand things differently, or provide us with an explanation of how the unthinkable had happened. And they wouldn’t bring Dylan back.
• • •
Yesterday was terrible. After it took me 4½ hours to get up, the rest of the day wasn’t much better. I cried and cried and just couldn’t get it together. I talked to S. in the afternoon and told her I couldn’t go back to work, after I’d just told her I could.
—Journal entry, May 1999
A month after Columbine, I was on the phone with Susie, my supervisor from work. She’d been terrific about checking in with me on a regular basis, occasionally delivering a meal, or a plant tied with good wishes from my coworkers. (Years of accumulated sick leave and unused personal days within the state community college system were the only reason I still had a job at all.)
I was crying, as usual. Susie listened for a while, and then she said: “I think you should come back to work.”
The idea startled me into silence. Returning to work would be impossible, preposterous. How in the world could I think about anything else but Dylan and the disaster he created? How could I leave the safety of my home, and face people who never knew Dylan the way I’d known him, the way I’d loved him?
“I can’t do it,” I said.
Gently, she persisted. Yes, we’d have to work out the details, but it would be good for me, and my colleagues could use my help. “What if I gathered a project you could do from home? Something with no deadline you could work on at your own speed?” I didn’t have the energy to protest. It was easier to agree than to push back.
The innocuous package Susie sent later that week sat untouched for days. Once I began, I could maybe get an hour’s worth of work done in a day—and on many days I couldn’t even do that. Returning to work for real seemed utterly hopeless.
But I needed to reconnect to a part of my identity that had nothing to do with being Dylan’s mother, and tackling a project that could be completed also appealed. Our personal lives felt monumental, unscalable. Nothing would ever be resolved, understood, or finished. A work project, even in my severely compromised condition, could be done, and done well. So I kept at the little project, even on days when it took me an hour to write a coherent sentence. Eventually I realized I couldn’t do it properly without collaborating with the members of my team. As my supervisor had hoped, the small project hooked me back into life, and I began to make plans to return to work, part-time.
I did so with trepidation. This was a relatively new job for me, and while I enjoyed cordial relationships with my new coworkers, I didn’t know any of them well. I worried that they didn’t have an image of my son to counter the image of him blaring from every news channel. As for me—well, I was the mother of a murderer.
I couldn’t stand thinking that the very fact of my presence would re-traumatize my colleagues. The community had suffered dreadfully, and tendrils reached into my workplace. The children and family members of some of my colleagues had been in the school and narrowly escaped with their lives. One coworker’s husband, a teacher at the school, had almost been shot. His close friend Dave Sanders died that day. An administrator’s daughter was in intensive therapy with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Each day brought a new headline about the investigation, the lawsuits, or the many conflicts brewing over access to information. Even if a coworker hadn’t known anyone in the school, how could they be expected to know what to say when we bumped into each other getting coffee in the break room? How could they know how to work with me?
Fortunately, the community college system I worked for had an outstanding leader at the helm, a president who understood the complexity of the situation. She wanted to help me to be comfortable, while simultaneously ensuring my presence would not be unduly troubling for anyone else. A week before I returned, she sent a memo to all system office staff. Anyone concerned about working with me, she wrote, should come to her. A policy was already in place to help employees deal with the torrent of media inquiries, and a counselor would be made available to anyone who needed support. While it was difficult to be the subject of such a memo, I greatly appreciated the wisdom of it.
I met with a staffer in the human resources department to make arrangements for my privacy and safety. I was amazed that she spoke about the accommodations as if my experience had been an ordinary setback, like a chronic illness or a parent with Alzheimer’s. We asked the receptionist to screen my calls, and to erase my schedule from the whiteboard. An administrator offered me her office so I could make personal calls behind a closed door. I slid my nameplate out from its bracket on my cubicle wall and tucked it away in my desk drawer.
A day or two before my return, the president sent one more memo, graciously hinting that my coworkers should give me enough personal space to find my equilibrium. She gently cautioned people not to overwhelm me with attention, though they might wish to offer their condolences. I was grateful for this wisdom, too.
Even with so much accommodation, my first day back at work was one of extreme emotional fragility. There was no room in my mind for anything but Dylan, and the horror of what he and Eric had done. I prayed I wouldn’t see anyone in the elevator on my way in—not so much because I felt ashamed, but because a single kind word or touch would make me cry, and I sensed that if I lost control so early in the day, I’d never be able to regain it.
Several of my associates had worked from my cubicle in my absence, answering calls and doing their best to sustain the momentum of ongoing projects. I was an intruder in the space. Papers I didn’t recognize were stacked in the corner; my computer’s password had been changed. Worse was the black telephone on my desk, monstrous to me. For many months afterward, a wave of anxiety would sweep over me when I found the red message light flashing on my phone. But there were no messages that first morning.
Before long, people began to pass by. Some offered words of welcome and sympathy. Others gave me a quick hug.
I arrived late to our large monthly staff meeting. All the chairs were taken, so I joined the people leaning against the back wall. For the first time since the tragedy, I was in a room filled with people, some of whom I did not know. It was hard not to feel that everyone was focused on me, although they were scrupulously careful not to stare.
My stamina was still poor in those early days, and simply standing proved to be too much. A few minutes into the meeting, I found myself short of breath and too weak to stand. I worried that sitting on the floor would look unprofessional, and the last thing I wanted to do was draw attention to myself, but I was going to pass out. So I slid down the wall to the floor, rearranging my skirt over my knees as best I could.
I ended up sitting cross-legged behind a row of chairs. One of my colleagues made eye contact and offered his seat. It was a lovely gesture—minimal enough not to embarrass me, but telling me I was noticed and cared about. I shook my head. No thanks;
I’m okay. You stay where you are. I spent the rest of the meeting on the floor, present but not present, watching the backs of people’s knees and listening although I was unable to see who was speaking.
Small victories, as they say. I wanted to hide, but I was there.
• • •
I was at work from 9–2:30 and made it through 4 meetings. I fought the whole time to look and act normal. I was slumped down and exhausted. By the end of the day I was beaten. I have huge, looming thoughts, and trying to get out normal words and thoughts and actions are like trying to push an elephant through the eye of a needle. No one can understand what I’ve been through or am going through. It’s all I can do to even attend or listen. When I got to my car after work, I shut the door and sobbed.
—Journal entry, June 1999
Although I did not realize it at the time, returning to work provided an essential framework for my recovery on many levels.
First of all, it allowed me to experience directly the compassion and sympathy other people were capable of. It made me cry to be hugged, but I learned to welcome the tears and not resist them. It was easier to allow myself to feel the sorrow than to suppress it. My colleagues walked the fine line of giving me my privacy while still showing compassion and myriad small kindnesses whenever they could. I doubt they will ever know how much they helped me.
In July, one of my coworkers came to my cubicle, representing the rest of the staff. In her arms was the most exquisite bouquet of dried flowers I had ever seen. We didn’t know each other well, and her manner was formal when she said that no matter what my son had done, he was still my baby and everyone with children related to my loss. I could see she had no love lost for Dylan, and she probably couldn’t understand why I had loved him either, but she was trying to find common ground. Gratitude overwhelmed me, and I was unable to speak.
Later in the fall, there was a craft sale in the break room, and I bought a couple of ornamental Christmas-themed pins to give to friends. I wrote a check and opened my wallet to show identification, but the woman working the cash box assured me it wasn’t necessary. “Right,” I said, putting my driver’s license away. “Because who on earth would pretend to be me?” It was the kind of black humor that sustained me in those days; in my awkward way, I was trying to put her at ease. But there was genuine heartbreak on her face.
Nobody I worked with spoke to the press, although the calls were constant. One reporter tricked the receptionist into connecting him with my supervisor. Frustrated, he confronted her: “Why hasn’t anyone there been willing to talk about Sue Klebold?”
“They’re not talking because they’re good people,” Susie told him sharply, and it was true.
My first weeks back, I could only think about Dylan. I would cry for most of the long drive downtown in the morning, appreciating the private time to connect with my memories before trying to put him out of my mind so I could function for the day. The last thing I did each morning before leaving my car was look in the mirror and wipe off the salt marks on my cheeks left by tears.
Despite the patience of my colleagues and my best efforts to behave professionally, I was a wreck. I was paralyzed by self-consciousness in a way I remembered from my own adolescence. Because I was having chronic intestinal issues as a result of the stress, I was scared to eat in case I suffered an attack without a bathroom close by. I did what I could to reduce my anxiety level—I even stopped setting an alarm clock because the sound would leave me jangly for an hour afterward—to no avail.
A friend told me once that the brain “on grief” is like an oldermodel computer running a program drastically too complex for its capacity—it grinds and stutters and halts over the simplest calculation. It took great effort just to hear what others said. My powers of concentration were nowhere near restored, and racing thoughts about my personal situation and about Dylan kept me in a world of my own.
I took copious notes, but no productivity trick could compensate for the deficit. My face still burns when I remember the first meeting I led after the tragedy. I asked everyone to go around in a circle to introduce themselves and say a little about what they did. When the room fell silent, I unwittingly invited them to go around the circle and introduce themselves—again. The sideways glances and uncomfortable seat-shifting alerted me to my mistake, but there was nothing to do but stumble through my apology.
It took a long time for me to return to a full schedule. In the same way my evening walks were helping me to rebuild my physical strength, so did I have to regain the emotional capacity to be around others. Work was a rehabilitation of sorts, a safe environment where I could rebuild my identity and work through my unique grief experience. The families of the victims were always on my mind, especially how difficult it must have been for them to try to resume some semblance of a normal life after what Dylan had done.
As time went by, my constant anguish began to feel almost comical. Stashed handkerchiefs dropped out of notepads, calendars, sleeves, and my pockets when I stood up. I could always be relied upon to provide a Kleenex pack. Seasonal allergies? Ask Sue.
I hoped for kindness, and for the most part I got it, more than I felt I deserved. But not everyone was kind and understanding, and that was okay too. The denial I had been living in—especially the belief that Dylan had been coerced into participating, or that he hadn’t directly committed any of the violence—was a natural response, but it was no longer appropriate. Being back in the world meant confronting the enormity of what Dylan had done.
I sensed judgment and anger and pain from some of the people I worked with. Friends told me when someone spoke unkindly behind my back. Some people avoided me, or confronted me indirectly. One of these incidents stands out in my mind, not because it was the worst confrontation, or the most devastating comment anyone made, but because it articulated exactly what I feared everyone was thinking, not to mention my own worst fears about myself.
I went along on a monitoring visit of a vocational program our office had funded in a small rural high school outside Denver. Being in a high school was difficult for me, and I fought tears the entire visit, especially when we stepped into a large computer lab where a group of happy, productive kids were working.
We introduced ourselves to the computer teacher, a young man not much older than his students, and congratulated him on the thriving program. When I said my name, he stared into my face with intensity. When one of our team members complimented his ability to keep so many machines in good working order, he said, “Well, you get to know the machines. After a while, it’s like being a good parent.” At that, he turned away from the person who’d asked the question so he could make searing eye contact with me. “When you’re a good parent, you just sort of know what your kids are up to.”
Those experiences hurt, and I hated them. But as much as I wanted to flee whenever the topic of Columbine surfaced, I could not spend my life walking out of meetings to avoid comments I did not want to hear, or not going to them at all so I’d never encounter a situation that might cause me distress. Despite the horrendous maelstrom of emotions I was living with, I wasn’t the only one hurting. I had to face the magnitude of Dylan’s actions, and accept how his terrible, violent choices had affected others. Each time I recovered from an uncomfortable encounter, I took another step toward accepting the totality of what Dylan had done. Whether people supported or judged me, being back to work put me shoulder to shoulder with the community my son tried to destroy.
I’d always been conscious of the opinions of others; suddenly, their approval was paramount. I felt sure my own behavior was being evaluated and judged and used to explain how Dylan could have killed and maimed. Always mildly obsessive about my work, I entered a period of intense perfectionism. I would make no errors, commit no miscommunication. I would catch every typo; do every project better than I needed to do it and with time to spare. It wasn’t enough to be competent, or normal; I had to convince others I had not caused the craziness exhibited by my son. I
f I did make a small mistake, I’d often become too upset to continue working. Whenever someone asked me a question, I felt criticized. Driving, I worried I’d accidentally injure or kill someone in my distraction, cementing the world’s conviction that I didn’t deserve to draw breath.
I looked at photographs of other people’s happy families on their desks and wondered: What did they do, that I didn’t? At the same time, I felt defensive and desperate to show people Dylan had been loved, that I’d been a good mother—and that, despite our closeness, I’d had no idea what he was planning or the slightest suspicion he was capable of such a barbaric act.
Of course, I was assigning to others all the negative feelings I had about myself. I had raised a murderer without knowing it, a person with such a faulty moral compass that he’d committed an atrocity. I was a fool, a sucker, a dolt. I hadn’t even been one of those cool parents who smokes pot with their kids or introduces them to their groovy boyfriends. No, I’d been an “everybody sits down for family dinner” kind of a parent, an “I want to meet your friends and their parents before you spend the night at their house” kind of a parent. What good had it done?
I remembered driving a kindergarten-aged Dylan back to the grocery so he could return a piece of penny candy he’d taken without paying for it, and how grateful I’d been when the manager soberly accepted Dylan’s apology and took the candy from his small hand instead of rewarding his theft by allowing him to keep it. I thought of all the times I’d called the mom hosting a sleepover to find out what movie she was planning to show. More than once, I’d asked for a less violent selection. Why had I bothered trying to establish a contextual framework for violence, when the whole world could see how miserably I failed to protect my son and so many others from it?
Mother's Reckoning : Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy (9781101902769) Page 14
