For twenty years, signing permission slips and designing elaborate Easter egg hunts and making sure my boys had sneakers that fit had been the touchstones of my life, around which I had fit my work and my art and my marriage. Now I had to ask: What had the point of any of it been?
It’s probably impossible to raise a child without having regrets. After murder-suicide, the guilt and second-guessing are constant, intolerable companions. When I went home from work at night, I paged obsessively through our family photo albums. There were the trips to the dairy farm, the natural history museum, the park—the ordinary stuff of a happy middle-class childhood. I was relieved to see how often in the photos Dylan was hugged, tickled, cuddled, or otherwise touched with love. I daydreamed about buttonholing strangers on the street and showing them the albums. There, I wanted to say. See? I’m not crazy. Look at how happy we were!
But the sight of Dylan’s arm, casually slung around Tom’s neck while he grinned and called out to me behind the camera, would once again tap in to that seemingly endless river of sorrow.
In the old movie Gaslight, the Charles Boyer character is trying to drive his wife, who is played by Ingrid Bergman, insane. He moves artwork and jewelry, and plants items he claims she’s “stolen” in her purse. It works: when his wife can no longer trust her own perceptions of reality, she begins to break down. I thought of Gaslight often in those days, as I tried to reconstruct an identity for myself. I had thought I’d been a good mother. I had loved and been proud of my son. Nothing I saw when Dylan was alive made me think he was suffering from problems of any real magnitude. Nor, looking back, could I see any obvious, screaming signs. The cognitive dissonance was intense.
When you’re a good parent, you just sort of know what your kids are up to. The teacher’s comment stung me more than hateful invective would have—not because I didn’t believe it, but because I did.
• • •
Tom mostly wonders if we will ever be reunited with him. This is on Tom’s mind constantly. He says he’d feel comforted if he knew he’d see him again. I think a lot about where Dylan is and whether his evil actions prevent him from resting in peace, in God’s care. I hope there is a forgiving God who will recognize that he was a child.
—Journal entry, May 1999
My friend Sharon lost a child to suicide, and she urged me to find a suicide loss survivors’ support group.
I was desperate to be among people who would listen and sympathize and not judge, but I could not imagine walking into a room filled with strangers and talking about what Dylan and Eric had done. More to the point, as Gary Lozow had pointed out, if our lawsuits went to trial, another support group participant might have to serve as a witness. I felt I had caused enough damage already.
The isolation was terrible. My anxiety levels were sky-high, and I felt very disconnected. We were not in communication with the Harrises. The one person in the world who might have been able to understand what I was going through was Tom, but the divide that had sprung up between us in the earliest days after the tragedy continued to widen.
This is not unusual, of course. Although the statistics you’ve heard about the likelihood of divorce after the death of a child are probably inflated, most marriages do suffer immense disruption. One often-cited reason is that women and men may grieve the loss differently: men tend to grieve the loss of the person the child would have become, while women tend to grieve the child they remember.
That divide was true for us. I incessantly reviewed memories of Dylan as a baby, a toddler, a child, and a teenager, while Tom focused on everything Dylan would never do because he was dead. This focus on Dylan’s lost future chafed me, as if Tom were pressuring Dylan posthumously to fill his fatherly expectations. The things we fought about seem unimportant to me now. We were lashed together, back to back, at the center of this terrible storm, but sometimes it felt worse to be with someone than to be alone.
Our coping mechanisms were often in conflict, too. I had always been more social and extroverted, while Tom preferred solitude. The tragedy exaggerated our respective orientations. As stressful as it was to expose myself to hatred and judgment, my reemergence into the world at large exposed me to kindness and generosity, too. Interacting with other people also meant my denial could not become entrenched. An unpleasant conversation might hurt my feelings and set me back temporarily, but ultimately I believed engaging with the outside world was helping me to come to terms with reality.
While I was pushing myself to get back out in the world, though, Tom was becoming increasingly private. I wanted to throw open the doors, and Tom wanted to circle the wagons. More and more, I found I was leaving him to it.
• • •
I sang sad songs and cried all the way to work. I could barely walk. I moved in slow motion. The words “Sometimes I feel like I’m almost gone” described how I felt. I got to work, sat at my desk and cried. I thought I might go home because I didn’t feel like working, then realized that home would be worse. Somehow, I eased into my work day and eventually the weight lifted and I began to concentrate on work.
—Journal entry, August 1999
My life split into two hemispheres: the grinding tumult of my personal life, and the quiet order of work.
My concentration grew. Every once in a while, for a minute or two or five or fifteen, I’d become absorbed enough to forget what I was grappling with. Those moments, when they happened, were a gift. Not only did they provide me with respite, but they connected me with the person I’d been before the tragedy: a reliable, capable person who could make a difference.
Just as our friends were opening up to us about their own adolescent traumas and transgressions, so did my coworkers begin to share their personal experiences of shame and loss. Once again, I realized there was a vast wellspring of pain and suffering in the world, one I was now irrevocably tapped in to.
One coworker’s son was serving a prison sentence for attempted murder. Another shared her firsthand experience with depression, suicidal thoughts, and psychiatric hospitalization. Hearing these stories was both an honor and a lesson. When my associates entrusted me with their own painful histories, it reminded me that my crisis, as enormous and inescapable as it felt, was just my crisis. Other people suffered. They endured terrible things, and they went on.
It was good to be able to offer comfort, too, however meager. I didn’t have anything profound to say, and anyway, who wanted advice from the mother of a murderer? But I could give, just by listening.
As I wrote in my journal,
I’ve learned two important things. One, that there are many good, kind people out there. And two, there are many people who have suffered greatly and who keep going with strength and courage. These are the ones who can eventually support others. I hope I can be of use to someone some day.
It would be a long road.
The stripping away of my identity showed me how tied up I had been, my whole life, with ego. I had always wanted to be liked, and had reveled in being a productive member of my community. I chose work through which I could help others; feeling good about what I was doing had always been more important than making tons of money. I had taken great pride in my sons, in the family Tom and I had built, and in being a good mother. After Columbine, none of that could be true anymore. I wasn’t just a bad mother, but the worst mother who ever was, openly hated on the front page of my local paper. Far from being liked and respected, the best I could hope for was that the people around me could find some measure of compassion along with their horror and judgment.
The challenge for myself was even steeper. I would never really be able to move beyond what Dylan had done. Like a cattle brand, the events at Columbine High School and my son’s role in them had become an indelible part of who I was. To survive, I would have to find a way to live in this new reality.
Short of ending my own life, there wasn’t anything I could do about what the rest of the world thought. My new and greatest hope was simply integration:
the old Sue with the new.
CHAPTER 10
The End of Denial
Right now all I want to do is die. Tom keeps saying he wishes he had never been born. Dylan was so loved, but he didn’t feel loved. I don’t think he loved anyone or anything. How did it happen? I didn’t know the boy I saw [on those tapes] today.
My relationship with Dylan in my head and heart has changed.
—Journal entry, October 1999
In October, six months after Columbine, the sheriff’s department agreed to share the evidence they’d collected. They invited Tom and me to come in for a presentation of the material.
My reaction to this news was complicated. After months of speculation and rumor and misinformation, it was a relief to know we would finally have the truth. At the same time (and for the same reason), I was petrified. As I wrote the week before: The meeting will take more courage than I can muster. I can only have my own little construct of what really happened until I speak with the investigators. I don’t want them to destroy the Dylan I am holding on to in my mind.
Two days before we were scheduled to go in, Gary Lozow called. The sheriff’s department had told him they would be presenting video evidence as part of their report, and wanted to warn us that seeing it might well be “more painful than April twentieth.”
Gary assumed they were referring to surveillance tape. Tom said he’d refuse to watch footage of the massacre. I couldn’t believe we were even discussing such a thing. If I had to see Dylan killing people, I’d go mad.
The night before the meeting, Tom and I compiled a list of questions. We were still convinced that Dylan had either been a reluctant participant or accidentally become entangled in something bigger than he understood at the time. We’d heard a rumor that military training materials on brainwashing techniques had been found in the Harris home, which had refueled our belief that Dylan had been another victim of the tragedy. It was plausible; Mr. Harris did have a military background. I entertained fantasies that we’d be able to hold a public memorial service.
But that was only a moment. I was coming to understand how fragile a construct we had created. Denial had been a necessary—indeed, perhaps a lifesaving—defense mechanism for me. As time went on, though, it was becoming more difficult to sustain. Much of what was reported in the media was wrong, which reinforced our skepticism. But we knew that Dylan had participated in the purchase of guns, and there were many credible eyewitness reports of Dylan shooting kids, and of the hateful things he’d said. The cracks in my cobbled-together belief system were beginning to widen.
As I suspected, the meeting at the sheriff’s office would blow them wide open.
• • •
Today is really like the end of my life as I knew it before. If I learn horrible things tomorrow that I must carry with me from now on, I will look back on today and remember it as the end of a better time. We worked on our questions tonight. Byron gave me a long hug to help me face tomorrow. I hope tomorrow does not destroy the memory of the boy I loved. I don’t know what this video is they want us to see.
—Journal entry, October 1999
On the morning of October 8, we went to the sheriff’s department. We had met the lead investigator, Kate Battan, and another investigator, Randy West, when they had questioned us in our lawyer’s office not long after the shootings. They’d been with us for our visit to the Columbine High School library. They were kind and profoundly professional in their interactions with us, and I was never more grateful for this than on that day.
After our initial greeting, Tom and I sat on two of the chairs arranged in rows in a room set up for a formal presentation. I thought about the Harrises, and about the other Columbine families. Sitting on the same chairs at different times seemed to be as close as we could be to each other.
Pointing to various locations on the diagram of the school they’d set up on an easel, Kate and Randy began to tell the story of what Dylan and Eric had done on the morning of April 20, 1999. It was the first time Tom and I learned from an official source what had happened that day, and in the days leading up to it.
The material that follows is graphic, and making the decision to include it here was not an easy one. The victims of this tragedy and their families have endured sorrows and hardships beyond measure, and I don’t want a description of the event itself to reinvigorate the trauma they have already experienced. There is also evidence to suggest that describing how these crimes are committed may provide a road map for other disturbed individuals to follow, although eliminating graphic images and dramatic language and minimizing details mitigates the likelihood of contagion.
That said, it is important to me to acknowledge the heinous acts Dylan and Eric committed prior to their deaths. Because so much of this book is focused on my love for Dylan, it is essential for me also to own the viciousness of his final moments on earth. As a practice, I do not minimize the magnitude of what Dylan did in order to comfort myself, and I never, ever forget how I would feel if Dylan was one of the innocent people slaughtered or maimed that day. My intention here is to honor the precious children and the beloved teacher who were.
Kate began to speak. The massacre had been carefully planned. The boys placed a small decoy bomb in a field about three miles away from the high school, hoping the explosion would distract emergency personnel from the events at the school. They drove to the school and entered the building around 11:15 with two duffel bags containing propane bombs. Outside, Eric ran into Brooks Brown, who reminded him about a test he’d missed. “It doesn’t matter anymore,” Eric said. “Brooks, I like you now. Get out of here. Go home.” Dylan and Eric placed the bombs inside the cafeteria and headed back to their cars to wait. When the bombs in the cafeteria did not explode as planned, the boys came back together, climbed to the top of the steps outside the school’s west entrance and began shooting.
Kate did not share with us the horrible details of what the boys said, how cruelly they treated some people, or where bullets or fragments of debris entered the bodies of the victims. She did her best to reduce the visual and auditory imagery, adhering instead to the chronological facts of who shot whom, which weapons had been used, and where at the school each individual had been injured. Intentional or not, I perceived this as an act of mercy, and I was grateful for it.
Eric shot Rachel Scott, killing her instantly, and Richard Castaldo, who was hit multiple times and paralyzed below the chest. Eric then shot at Daniel Rohrbough and Sean Graves and Lance Kirklin, who were climbing the hill toward them, killing Daniel and wounding the other two. Five students were sitting on the grass opposite the west entrance. Eric shot at them. Michael Johnson was hit, but he ran and escaped with his life. Mark Taylor was also shot multiple times but survived by pretending to be dead. The other three students ran.
Dylan walked down the steps toward the cafeteria. He shot Lance Kirklin and stepped over Sean Graves on his way into the building. Eric, still outside, shot at several students sitting near the door to the cafeteria, paralyzing Anne Marie Hochhalter. Without shooting at anyone or investigating the bombs in the cafeteria, Dylan rejoined him, and together they shot at a distant group of kids who had escaped over the chain-link fence to the soccer fields. They did not hit anyone.
Patti Nielson, a teacher, headed outside from the second floor to stop what she thought must be a video project or a prank. As she approached the doors of the west entrance, the boys shot out the glass in the doors, injuring a student, Brian Anderson, with flying glass and hitting Nielson in the shoulder. Nielson ran into the library and told the students there to get under the tables. She hid under the library counter and called 911.
Columbine’s armed school guard, Deputy Neil Gardner, arrived in the parking lot. Eric shot at him, and Gardner shot back, but Gardner did not hit him. Gardner and another deputy from the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office also exchanged fire with Eric a little later, but no one was hit.
The boys entered the building. Eric had shot
his rifle forty-seven times. Dylan had shot three times with his handgun and two with his shotgun. The boys had also thrown pipe bombs.
Eric and Dylan moved through a hallway, throwing pipe bombs and shooting at random. Stephanie Munson was injured by a bullet. Then Dave Sanders, who taught business at the school, and who had evacuated a huge number of students from the cafeteria and personally seen them to safety, came around the corner, looking for more people to warn. He and another student saw Dylan and Eric and turned to warn some others. Both boys shot down the hallway toward Dave Sanders; it’s still not known whose shots killed him. Rich Long, another teacher, dragged him into a classroom, where two students, Aaron Hancey and Kevin Starkey, administered first aid for three hours. Despite their efforts, he died later that afternoon, still waiting to be evacuated.
Dylan and Eric threw two pipe bombs over the railing into the cafeteria below; these exploded. They threw a pipe bomb into the library hallway that also exploded. Then they went into the library. Eric shot at a desk where Evan Todd was hiding; Evan was hit but not seriously injured. Dylan fatally shot Kyle Velasquez, who was hiding underneath a computer workstation. The boys reloaded and then began shooting out the window at the rescue workers helping the students outside. Dylan then shot at a table, injuring Daniel Steepleton and Makai Hall. Eric shot under a desk without looking, fatally wounding Steven Curnow, and then injured Kacey Ruegsegger. He walked over to another desk and killed Cassie Bernall. Dylan shot Patrick Ireland as he was helping Makai Hall.
Underneath another set of tables, Dylan found Isaiah Shoels, Matthew Kechter, and Craig Scott, Rachel Scott’s younger brother. Dylan hurled racial epithets at Isaiah before Eric shot and killed him. Dylan then shot and killed Matthew Kechter. Eric threw a CO2 cartridge at the table where Makai, Daniel, and Patrick were. Makai managed to throw it away before it exploded.
Mother's Reckoning : Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy (9781101902769) Page 15
