Two weeks later, Dylan vomited profusely after a feeding, and then after the next. Badly frightened, I took him to the emergency room. The doctors kept him two nights for observation, but found nothing. At the follow-up visit I insisted upon later that week, three-week-old Dylan was pale, dehydrated, and below his birth weight. By then, the condition had developed enough to show up on an X-ray, and Dylan was diagnosed with pyloric stenosis, a narrowing at the base of the stomach. The doctor sent us back to the hospital. The situation was so serious, Dylan might have died without immediate surgery.
After he pulled through that harrowing ordeal and turned into his sweet, plump, rosy-cheeked baby self, I felt all the obvious relief and more besides, sure that this serious illness—disaster averted—was my premonition realized.
That childhood illness was also the last time, until his junior year of high school, that I ever had real cause to worry about Dylan.
CHAPTER 6
Boyhood
With Dylan as a toddler, playing in the snow.
The Klebold Family
The terror and total disbelief are overwhelming. The sorrow of losing my son, the shame of what he has done, the fear of the world’s hatred. There is no respite from the agony.
—Journal entry, April 1999
I’ve kept a diary most of my life. In late elementary school and junior high, I poured my hopes and dreams onto the pages of little books I kept locked and hidden—not that anyone on earth cared what blouse I’d worn, or where I’d taken my dog for a walk. I filled one page to the bottom, every day. If my sister grew impatient and turned off our bedroom light, I’d finish the page in the dark.
In high school and college, I focused more on writing letters to my sister and my mother and my grandparents, although I did make time to write (bad) poetry. After I married and had children, I journaled whenever I wanted to remember landmark events or cope with difficult emotions. I took pleasure in recording the developmental milestones of both my children, and captured the dates when they noticed their own hands for the first time, or rolled over, or took their first steps. As the boys grew, and managing their busy lives took more of my time, the entries grew shorter and more quotidian: “Byron to dentist, must floss. Dylan’s team won: 6–3!”
In the first days after Columbine, I turned again to writing as an outlet, in a journal Dylan had given me for Christmas. Tom and I always told the boys not to bother buying us expensive gifts, and so I had been touched, in 1997, to find a leather-bound writing journal in my stocking. I made such a fuss over how great it was that Dylan got me another diary for Christmas in 1998, this one with a reproduction of Edvard Munch’s The Scream on the cover. The image seemed ominously symbolic afterward, of course, but at the time I was simply touched by the thoughtful gift—both art-and writing-themed, and therefore perfect for me.
After Columbine, the relief I got from writing felt almost physical, if temporary. My diaries became the place for me to corral the myriad, often-contradictory feelings I had about my son and what he had done. In the earliest days, writing allowed me to process my tremendous grief for the sorrow and suffering Dylan had caused. Before I could reach out personally to the families of the victims, the journals were a place for me to apologize to them with all my heart, and to grieve privately for the losses they had sustained.
The diaries were also a place for me to “set the record straight.” In the immediate aftershock of the tragedy, we weren’t mourning simply Dylan, but also his very identity—and ours. It was impossible to correct the floods of misinformation in the media, but I wanted to tell our side of the story, if only in private. The pages of my notebook became a place for me to silently respond to the people who called us animals and monsters, to correct misapprehensions about my son and our family. Some of those pages reflect my feelings of defensiveness and even anger toward those who judged us without knowing us. I was not proud of those feelings, and was glad to keep them hidden, but they were necessary for me at the time, and I see the details I obsessed over as unwitting testaments to the shock and grief I was feeling.
Writing in my diary also allowed me the space to reflect on my own loss when I did not feel safe enough to speak about it openly. Our lawyer had told me I could not attend a support group without putting the other members at risk of being deposed, but I needed a safe space to remember and eulogize my son. To the rest of the world, Dylan was a monster; but I had lost my child.
And so, especially in those very early days, a great deal of what I filled my diaries with was memories. Later, I would revisit these as a form of forensic accounting, an attempt to see where things had gone so horribly wrong. Much of grieving is the process of encapsulating the individual in your memory, and for years my grief would be tangled up with wondering what had been in Dylan’s mind at the end of his life. Trying to unravel the mystery would come later. In those first days, I wrote simply out of love.
I downloaded every memory I could dredge up of Dylan—as a child, a young boy, a teenager. I revisited his triumphs and disappointments, as well as a host of small, ordinary moments from our life together. Petrified I’d forget, I recorded the well-worn family stories and inside jokes we’d cherished together, words and phrases that could reduce any one of the four of us to helpless laughter while remaining incomprehensible to an outsider. Writing made me feel close to him.
I know telling these stories here exposes me to further criticism. The thought fills me with fear, although there’s no criticism of my parenting I have not already heard over the last sixteen years. I’ve heard that Tom and I were too lenient with Dylan, and that we were too restrictive. I’ve been told that our family’s position on gun control caused Columbine; perhaps if Dylan had been habituated to guns, they would not have had the same mystique for him. People have asked me if we abused Dylan, if we permitted someone else to abuse him, if we ever hugged him, if we ever told him that he was loved.
Of course I look back skeptically on the decisions we made. Of course I have regrets, in particular about the clues I missed that Dylan was in danger of hurting himself and others. It is precisely because I missed them that I want to tell these stories, because whatever parenting decisions Tom and I might have made, they were done thoughtfully and in good conscience, and to the best of our abilities. I tell these stories not to burnish my son’s reputation, or our own as parents. But I do think it’s important, especially for parents and teachers, to understand what Dylan was like.
In the fifteen years I’ve worked in suicide and violence prevention, I’ve heard hundreds of stories of lives that ended in tragedy. Sometimes, parents tell me they knew their kid was in trouble. They describe a baby they couldn’t settle; disturbingly antisocial behaviors in elementary school; an angry, violent teenager they grew to fear. In many cases, these parents tried repeatedly, and often without success, to get their kids help. I will talk more about cases like these later in this book; we must make it easier for parents and other gatekeepers to get help for a child who is obviously having a hard time before that child becomes a danger to himself and others. But I mention those struggling families here because I want to make an important differentiation. That child, whose difficulties surface early and strain his or her whole family for years? That was not my son.