Morality, empathy, ethics—these weren’t one-time lessons, but embedded in everything we did with our kids. I’d taught the boys what I myself believe—that we should treat others as we wish to be treated. Dylan was expected to help our neighbors with their yard work without the expectation of payment because that’s what neighbors do, and to hold the door open for the person coming in behind him because that’s what gentlemen do.
I’m a teacher by constitution. Everything I knew and cared about and valued, I poured into my kids. A trip to the grocery store wasn’t merely a stopover to restock the fridge, but a way to show my boys how to select the freshest apple, an invitation to think about the hardworking farmers who had grown it, and to talk about the ways fruits and vegetables make a growing body healthy and strong. It was a chance for me to introduce the vocabulary words “carmine” and “vermilion.” I showed Dylan how to be gentle putting the fruit into the basket; we let an elderly lady with one or two items slip ahead of us in line; we made eye contact and said a polite “thank you” to the cashier. Nervous about inattentive drivers, I would take his hand when we went to tuck our shopping cart back into its spot so it couldn’t roll out and dent someone else’s car.
My approach changed slightly as the boys grew, but the message never did. Driving home from Little League, I tried to counterbalance the sport’s natural message of competition with one of empathy: the kids on the other team are just like you. Dylan came to work with me whenever the opportunity arose, and though I never saw the students I worked with as “teaching moments,” he learned—better than most kids, and through exposure—that people were more than their cerebral palsy or their amputated limb. He saw, too, that even after terrible difficulty, people could create meaningful and productive lives.
Similarly, Tom had worked to help his boys become good men. Through sports, he helped them understand fair play, the importance of a heartfelt effort, and the pleasure of teamwork. Working with them on repairs, he taught them science and engineering and construction—as well as the satisfaction in solving a challenging problem, not to mention the thrift and gratification of fixing something broken instead of throwing it away. He prompted them to do their chores without complaining, and helped them to remember me on special occasions like Mother’s Day.
We had not done everything right. The research I have done has taught me better ways I might have interacted with Dylan. I wish I had listened more instead of lecturing; I wish I had sat in silence with him instead of filling the void with my own words and thoughts. I wish I had acknowledged his feelings instead of trying to talk him out of them, and that I’d never accepted his excuses to avoid conversation—I’m tired, I have homework to do—when something felt off. I wish I’d sat in the dark with him, and repeated my concerns when he dismissed them. I wish I’d dropped everything else to focus on him, probed and prodded more, and that I had been present enough to see what I did not.
Even with these regrets, there were no obvious indications he was planning something destructive. I have heard many terrible stories of good people struggling to parent seriously ill, violent kids. I have nothing but compassion for them, and feel we must rehabilitate a health care system that too often leaves them out in the cold. If you want to feel sick to your stomach, listen to a mom tell you about the day her volatile ten-year-old narrowly missed stabbing her with the kitchen shears, and how it felt to call the police on him because she was worried the lock on his younger sister’s bedroom door wouldn’t hold against his rage. Too often, parents of seriously disturbed kids are forced to get the criminal justice system involved—even though it is drastically ill-equipped to manage brain illness—simply because there is nowhere else to turn. Unless a family can afford a private clinic, the choice is often between denying the severity of the problem and calling the cops. The question of accountability is not theoretical for those mothers.
As huge as my empathy is for those mothers, my situation was very different. Dylan showed no clear and present danger, the way some children do. He was going to school, holding down a job in the evening, and applying to colleges. Days before the massacre he was eating dinner with us as usual, keeping the conversation light and carrying his dirty dishes to the sink.
He did hole up in his room, but he hadn’t withdrawn from his peers. He did not have access to weapons in our home, nor did he display any unseemly fascination with them. He was occasionally truculent and irritable, as many teenagers are, but we never saw any hint of the rage he displayed on the Basement Tapes. He did not threaten us, get into physical altercations, or allude to plans to hurt others. Neither Tom nor I had ever—not once—felt afraid of him.
We thought we saw evidence our parenting was working. Dylan was a good and loyal friend, a loving son, and he appeared to be growing into a responsible adult. In his writing, there is ample proof that he had absorbed the teachings we had worked so hard to impart; his journals are filled with his struggles with conscience. And yet, at the end of his life, something overwrote the lessons we had taught him.
Not all influence comes from within the home, and this is especially true in the case of teenagers. “Nurture” refers to all the environmental factors a person encounters. Dylan was interested in gratuitously bloodthirsty movies like Reservoir Dogs and Natural Born Killers—but so was every boy we knew. We did not buy those movies, or take him to the theater to see them. We also did not forbid them in our home after he reached the age of seventeen, figuring he would get access to them if he wanted to; he was working, and had his own money. We did talk to him about our concerns.
He also played Doom, one of the earliest first-person-shooter games. I hadn’t liked the game, but I’d mostly worried that Dylan’s computer use would isolate him, which hadn’t been the case at all. My primary complaint about video games was how dumb they were, a waste of time. As with everything, my take on video games was filtered through my primary belief in Dylan’s goodness. It would never have crossed my mind that he was capable of making the leap from shooting people on-screen to shooting them in real life.
Looking back, that was a mistake. There is good research now to show that violent games like Doom decrease empathy and increase aggressive behavior. Detractors point out that millions play these games (an estimated ten million people have played Doom), and only a tiny fraction of those go on to commit violence. But Dr. Dewey Cornell, a forensic clinical psychologist—and author of more than two hundred papers on psychology and education, including studies of juvenile homicide, school safety, bullying, and threat assessment—gave me his take on entertainment violence.
“One cigarette won’t give you lung cancer, and some people smoke their whole lives without getting lung cancer. That doesn’t mean there’s no correlation. Entertainment violence may not be sufficient cause for a rampage, but it is a toxic factor. A small number of the most vulnerable people will get lung cancer after smoking when other factors and predispositions come into play. The same thing can be said about violent entertainment and acts of violence: the most vulnerable are at special risk.” But Tom and I did not perceive Dylan as vulnerable. Nor did anyone else.
Dylan’s vulnerabilities were probably the same ones that had made him so susceptible to Eric, another toxic influence. I was blind to it because I never perceived Dylan to be a follower. He was agreeable by nature; a typical younger sibling, he’d go along with Byron’s games when the boys were young, and Tom and I could generally get him to do what we needed him to do without pushback. But I had plenty of opportunity to observe Dylan with his friends, and those relationships were equally negotiated. I never felt Zack or Nate had the upper hand with him. If Nate had a hankering for pizza while Dylan was craving McDonald’s, they worked it out.
I still resist the idea that Dylan was nothing more than a passive follower. Eric’s charm and charisma were undeniable, and he was adroitly fooling adults, some of them mental health professionals, including a counselor and a psychiatrist. And yet I cannot easily explain how Dylan tur
ned his back on seventeen years of empathy and conscience. Eric may have been the one who was single-mindedly focused on homicide, but Dylan went along. He did not say no. He did not tell us about the plan, or tell a teacher or one of his other friends. Instead he said yes, and entered into a plot so diabolical it defies description.
I will never know why Dylan latched on to the violence Eric suggested. His journals make clear that Dylan was profoundly insecure, and felt hopelessly inadequate. Eric probably made him feel validated and accepted and powerful in a way nobody else did—and then offered him the chance to show the world just how powerful the two of them really were.
Dr. Adam Lankford cites “a desire for fame, glory or attention as a motive” for mass shooters. Ralph Larkin calls it “killing for notoriety.” Mark Juergensmeyer, who writes about religious terrorism, calls it “the public performance of violence” and argues that acts like these have symbolic, as well as strategic, goals. Sociologist Dr. Katherine Newman, author of Rampage, ties it directly to image rehabilitation when she says school shooters are “searching for a way to retire their public image as dweebs and misfits, exchanging it for something more alluring: the dangerous, violent antihero.”
I was surprised not to be asked in the depositions the details of how we’d handled discipline, movies, video games, Dylan’s friendships, drugs and alcohol, clothing, firecrackers. But an in-depth look at the root causes of the catastrophe was outside the purview of the proceedings. The depositions were not a place to talk about bullying, or gun safety, or school climate, or the immaturity of the adolescent brain. I had not yet begun to talk to experts myself. Even at that early stage, though, I was clear on one point: I did not—and do not—believe I made Dylan a killer.
If I had thought there was something seriously wrong with him, I would have moved mountains to fix it. If I had known about Eric’s website or the guns, or about Dylan’s depression, I would have parented differently. As it was, I parented the best way I knew to parent the child I knew—not the one he had become without my knowledge.
• • •
Unsurprisingly, the news reports after the depositions were highly inflammatory, as so much of the coverage had been. The sealed transcripts of the proceedings gave the impression we were hiding something—again.
I wanted to share the transcripts with the public. Why not? I was tired of fielding the implication I had something to hide when I spent my days hunting for answers. Perhaps naively, I still hoped releasing the transcripts might finally put to bed the idea there was a single reason the tragedy had happened. And, unlike the Basement Tapes, there was no danger of contagion from releasing them.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t my decision. All four parents of the shooters had been deposed, and the attorneys never reached consensus on everyone’s best interests. Eventually the judge decided to seal the depositions for twenty years.
I hadn’t said everything I wanted to say when I was deposed, but I thought if the families could see and hear me, they’d understand that whatever the engine for Dylan’s crimes had been, it had not started in our home. The papers the next morning showed me my folly. There it was again: conscientious parents would have known what their sons were planning; our failure to know meant we were responsible. Nothing would ever change how people perceived us.
I shredded the newspaper in my hands and pounded the bed with my fists until my wailing subsided. Hurt as I was, I also understood. I too had believed a good parent should know what her kids were thinking. If the situations had been reversed, if someone else’s son had murdered Dylan while he was catching up on his homework in the school library, I would have blamed that family too.
• • •
I continued to experience high levels of stress, loss of sleep, and poor concentration after the depositions. Ten days afterward, we heard that the plaintiffs were ready to settle. The lawyers acted as if this was a great relief, but I didn’t feel the least bit uplifted. No legal resolution would alleviate the dread that sat in the center of my chest, the hopeless feeling that I had reached the end of my ability to cope.
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.
Mother's Reckoning : Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy (9781101902769) Page 30
