I promised my aunt I would be in touch, and hung up to keep the line open for communication from the school.
As the shadows lengthened, time slowed. Tom and I muddled through our uncertainty in hushed whispers. We had no choice but to accept Dylan’s involvement, but neither of us could believe he had participated in a shooting under his own free will. He must have become mixed up with a criminal, somehow, or a group of them, who forced him to participate. We even considered that someone had threatened to harm us, and he had gone along in order to protect us. Maybe he had gone into the school thinking it was a harmless joke, some kind of theater, only to learn at the last minute he was using live ammunition?
I simply could not, would not, believe Dylan participated voluntarily in hurting people. If he had, the kind, funny, goofy kid that we loved so much must have been tricked, threatened, coerced, or even drugged into doing it.
Later we would learn that Dylan’s friends spun similar explanations for the events unfurling around them. Not one of them considered he might willingly be involved. None of us would learn the true level of his involvement—or the depths of his rage, alienation, and despair—until many months later. Even then, many of us would struggle to reconcile the person we knew and loved with what he’d done that day.
We stayed out there in the driveway, suspended in limbo, the passing hours marked only by our helpless confusion as we careened from hope to dread. The phone rang and rang and rang. Then the glass storm door of our house once again swung open, and this time I could hear the television Tom had left on in our bedroom, echoing inside the empty rooms. A local news anchor was reporting from outside Columbine High School. I heard him say the latest reports had twenty-five people dead.
Like mothers all over Littleton, I had been praying for my son’s safety. But when I heard the newscaster pronounce twenty-five people dead, my prayers changed. If Dylan was involved in hurting or killing other people, he had to be stopped. As a mother, this was the most difficult prayer I had ever spoken in the silence of my thoughts, but in that instant I knew the greatest mercy I could pray for was not my son’s safety, but for his death.
CHAPTER 2
Slivers of Glass
As the afternoon turned to twilight and then to darkness, I let go of my last hope that Dylan would zoom up the drive in the dented old black BMW he’d fixed up with his dad, laughing and wondering about dinner.
Late in the day, I cornered a member of the SWAT team and asked him a question, point-blank:
“Is my son dead?”
“Yes,” he told me. As soon as he said it, I realized I had already known it to be true.
“How did he die?” I asked him. It seemed important to know. Had Dylan been killed by the police or by one of the shooters? Had he taken his own life? I hoped he had. At least if Dylan died by suicide, I’d know he had wanted to die. Later, I would come to regret that wish almost as bitterly as I’ve ever regretted anything.
The SWAT team member shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. And then he turned away, leaving me alone.
? ? ?
It will perhaps seem callous that my focus was so squarely on Dylan—on the question of his safety, and later on the fact of his death. But my obligation is to offer the truth to the degree to which my memory will allow, even when that truth reflects badly on me. And the truth is that my thoughts were with my son.
Over the course of the afternoon, I had come to understand Dylan was suspected of shooting people, but this fact registered with me only in an abstract way at first. I was convinced Dylan could not have been responsible for taking anyone’s life. I was beginning to accept he had been physically present during the shootings, but Dylan had never hurt anyone or anything in his life, and I knew in my heart he could not have killed anyone. I was wrong, of course—about that and many things. At the time, though, I was sure.
So, in those first hours and even days, I wasn’t thinking about the victims or about the anguish of their loved ones and friends. Just as our bodies experience shock when we experience extreme trauma—we’ve all heard stories of soldiers in combat who run for miles unaware of a severed limb—a similar phenomenon occurs with severe psychological trauma. A mechanism to preserve our sanity kicks in and lets in only what we can bear, a little at a time. It is a defense mechanism, breathtaking in its power both to shield and to distort.
Whatever mercy there was in not knowing was short-lived. My anguish over the lives lost or destroyed by my son’s hand, and for the pain and suffering this caused their families and friends, is with me every single day. It will never go away, as long as I live. I will never see a mother in the cereal aisle with her little girl without wondering if that beautiful child will reach adulthood. I will never see a cluster of teenagers laughing and bumping each other at Starbucks without wondering if one of them will be robbed of life before he’s had the chance to live it in full. I will never see a family enjoying a picnic or a baseball game or walking into church without thinking of the relatives of those my son murdered.
In writing this book, I hope to honor the memories of the people my son killed. The best way I know to do that is to be truthful, to the best of my ability. And so, this is the truth: my tears for the victims did eventually come, and they still do. But they did not come that day.
? ? ?
We were still standing in the gravel driveway when the bomb squad arrived. Shortly after, it began to drizzle, and I sought shelter on our doorstep with Tom, Byron, our tenant Alison, and Judy Brown. We clustered tightly together under the narrow ledge over our front door. It grew dark and cold suddenly, and the change in weather heightened our sense of vulnerability and our fear of what was to come.
Reflexively, I thought to pray, and then—for the first time in my life—I stopped myself from reaching for that comfort.
While my mother’s parents were Christian, my father had been brought up in a Jewish home, so my siblings and I were raised in both traditions. There are significant differences between the two religions, but both shared a conception of God as a loving, understanding Father. Since childhood, I had taken refuge in that understanding of Him. However, there was no solace for me there in the early evening of April 20, 1999. Instead, I felt a real sense of fear. I was afraid to make eye contact with God.
Every night since the birth of my children, I had asked God to protect and guide them. I truly believed those prayers watched over my sons. As the boys grew, I’d amended my evening prayer to include the safety of others. When Byron was first entering adolescence, I heard a dreadful story on the news: a teenager had stolen a stop sign from an intersection, a lark resulting in a fatal accident. The idea that one of my children would unwittingly cause harm became my worst nightmare. I never worried they’d hurt someone deliberately; I’d never had any cause to worry about such a thing, from either of them. But, especially as I gripped the dashboard while they were first learning to navigate the narrow, winding canyon roads between our house and town, I hoped no expression of pure teenaged stupidity or carelessness would ever result in injury to someone else. Now those prayers had resolved themselves into a reality so horrific, I lacked the moral imagination to fully grasp it.