Quote by Dylan's mother.

I recently read an article that said Dylan's mother had been hoping that her son would take his own life. But another article from her said that even after she knew Dylan was the shooter she kept asking police "Where is Dylan? Is he okay?" Do you think that Dylan's mother really wanted her youngest son to kill himself? Regardless of what he had done, that was still HER child that she had raised and loved. I wonder if she only said she wanted him to kill himself because she felt bad for the families of the people Dylan murdered and felt guilty mourning for her own son. These are just random thoughts I've been having since reading a few articles. I hope no one minds that I created this topic and if it has already been discussed I apologized but as someone said in another thread, people are always coming and going so I thought, if anything, some new opinions might be out there.

She wanted him to kill himself before he could hurt anyone else.

She wanted that for the reason that sergeant hartman said and because she feared that he would eventually be sentenced to death if he was captured and tried but she has said that in the end was really regret about it.

He wouldn't have given the death penalty. He was only 17.

Jenn wrote:

He wouldn't have given the death penalty. He was only 17.

But thats what she said, maybe she wasnt very aware of that.

She would have aware of it. She's an American citizen, and a resident of Colorado. Only in very rare cases do they actually put a juvenile on death row. For instance, in another state in America (Florida) a 17-year-old boy was put on death row and was seen as the "youngest ever" to be punished in such a way, and this was a year before the massacre.

The entire quote about it by Susan taken in her interview with Tom in the book Far From The Tree:

“I had a sudden
vision of what he might be doing,” Sue
said. “And so while every other mother
in Littleton was praying that her child
was safe, I had to pray that mine would
die before he hurt anyone else. I
thought if this was really happening and
he survived, he would go into the
criminal justice system and be executed,
and I couldn’t bear to lose him twice. I
gave the hardest prayer I ever made,
that he would kill himself, because then
at least I would know that he wanted to
die and wouldn’t be left with all the
questions I’d have if he got caught by a
police bullet. Maybe I was right, but I’ve
spent so many hours regretting that
prayer: I wished for my son to kill
himself, and he did.”

Mj2beat wrote:

Jenn wrote:

He wouldn't have given the death penalty. He was only 17.

But thats what she said, maybe she wasnt very aware of that.

Ivan wrote:

She would have aware of it. She's an American citizen, and a resident of Colorado. Only in very rare cases do they actually put a juvenile on death row. For instance, in another state in America (Florida) a 17-year-old boy was put on death row and was seen as the "youngest ever" to be punished in such a way, and this was a year before the massacre.

Jenn and Ivan, what are you trying to say exactly?

What is the relevance of the actual law to Sue Klebold's state of mind at this moment?

One of the people who posted before me said that perhaps Sue Klebold was hoping Dylan would kill himself that way he didn't receive the death penalty. My reply had nothing to do with Sue's state of mind. I was only pointing out that Dylan would not have been able to be given a death sentence, had he been caught, because in Colorado you cannot receive the death penalty unless you are over the age of 18.

You all make excellent points. I personally feel like she felt guilty mourning her own son because of what he had done. I'm not sure I am 100% convinced she actually wanted him to take his own life. Yes, I am sure she didn't want him to harm any more people but I think she would've been able to get a lot more answers and a better piece of mind had Dylan not killed himself. This isn't facts here, this is just what I've been thinking.

I initially took it as a "if someone has to suffer from a loss, let it be me" sort of thing. As if she was praying that BEFORE she found out her son was guilty. But now it looks like the "while other mothers prayed their children were safe, I prayed mine would die instead of someone else's" quote I first read may have been taken out of context.

The chapter about Dylan Klebold in Andrew Solomon's book is one of the best things about Columbine I've read. You have to read it if you want to understand Dylan.

lasttrain wrote:

The chapter about Dylan Klebold in Andrew Solomon's book is one of the best things about Columbine I've read. You have to read it if you want to understand Dylan.

True! I post a thread with quotes from that chapter on the documents section a few days ago if someone want to read it but there are 5 parts of the complete chapter on tumblr.

lasttrain wrote:

The chapter about Dylan Klebold in Andrew Solomon's book is one of the best things about Columbine I've read.  You have to read it if you want to understand Dylan.

God damn. Is that part anywhere on the internet without having to pay money/buy the book? Short on cash and curiosity is killing me.
Edit : found the quotes , nevermind ;p

Magnaphoria wrote:

lasttrain wrote:

The chapter about Dylan Klebold in Andrew Solomon's book is one of the best things about Columbine I've read.  You have to read it if you want to understand Dylan.

God damn. Is that part anywhere on the internet without having to pay money/buy the book? Short on cash and curiosity is killing me.
Edit : found the quotes , nevermind ;p

There is on tumblr, someone posted five parts of the whole chapter, just look for it like "Klebols Far From The Tree part 1"

Thank you for helping me edit this post --

This is not from me but it is a a great post:

Far from the Tree - Pt 1 - “Bye” (Forever)

On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, seniors at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, placed bombs in the cafeteria, set to go off during first lunch period at 11: 17 a.m., and planned to shoot anyone who tried to flee. Errors in the construction of the detonators prevented the bombs from exploding, but Klebold and Harris nevertheless held the whole school hostage, killing twelve students and one teacher before turning their guns on themselves. At the time, it was the worst episode of school violence in history. The American Right blamed the collapse of “family values,” while the Left mounted assaults on violence in the movies and sought to tighten gun-control laws. Wholesale critiques of the larger culture were offered as explanation for these inexplicable events.

The number of people killed that day is generally listed as thirteen, and the Columbine Memorial commemorates only thirteen deaths, as though Klebold and Harris had not also died that day in that place. Contrary to wide speculation then and since, the boys did not come from broken homes and did not have records of criminal violence. The wishful thought of a world that witnessed this horror was that good parenting could prevent children from developing into Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold, but malevolence does not always grow in a predictable or accountable manner. As the families of autistics or schizophrenics wonder what happened to the apparently healthy people they knew, other families grapple with children who have turned to horrifying acts and wonder what happened to the innocent children they thought they understood.

I set out to interview Tom and Sue Klebold with the expectation that meeting them would help to illuminate their son’s actions. The better I came to know the Klebolds, the more deeply mystified I became. Sue Klebold’s kindness (before Dylan’s death, she worked with people with disabilities) would be the answered prayer of many a neglected or abused child, and Tom’s bullish enthusiasm would lift anyone’s tired spirits. Among the many families I’ve met in writing this book, the Klebolds are among those I would be most game to join. Trapped in their own private Oresteia, they learned astonishing forgiveness and empathy. They are victims of the terrifying, profound unknowability of even the most intimate human relationship. It is easier to love a good person than a bad one, but it may be more difficult to lose a bad person you love than a good one. Sue Klebold once said to me, “I watched Rosemary’s Baby the other night and my heart really went out to Rosemary.” When Barbara Walters interviewed the father of one of Dylan’s classmates after the events, he said of the Klebolds, “They’re in a glass cage. And they have no more pieces to this puzzle than anybody else.”

The last Sue Klebold heard from Dylan, the younger of her two children, was “Bye” as he let the front door slam on his way to school that April 20. In the middle of the day, Tom received a call about the shootings at school and learned that Dylan was a suspect. He called Sue. “I had a sudden vision of what he might be doing,” Sue said. “And so while every other mother in Littleton was praying that her child was safe, I had to pray that mine would die before he hurt anyone else. I thought if this was really happening and he survived, he would go into the criminal justice system and be executed, and I couldn’t bear to lose him twice. I gave the hardest prayer I ever made, that he would kill himself, because then at least I would know that he wanted to die and wouldn’t be left with all the questions I’d have if he got caught by a police bullet. Maybe I was right, but I’ve spent so many hours regretting that prayer: I wished for my son to kill himself, and he did.”

That night, police told the Klebolds to leave their house— both so the police could turn it inside out, and for their own safety. “I thought about Dylan being dead,” Sue said, “and I thought, ‘He was young and healthy and maybe he could be an organ donor.’ And then I thought, ‘Would anyone want the organs of a murderer?’ That was my first taste of how the world would see my son.”

Excerpt - Solomon, Andrew (2012-11-13)

Far from the Tree - Pt. 2 - Try Walking in His Shoes: Forever Dirt

The Klebolds went to stay with Tom’s sister for four days, returning home on the day of Dylan’s funeral. “We didn’t really know what had happened,” Sue said. “We just knew Dylan was dead, that he’d killed himself, that he was involved with the shooting.”

As Littleton’s period of mourning began, a carpenter from Illinois erected fifteen crosses on a hillside near the school. “I was so buoyed by this,” Tom said. “I wanted to be a part of the community. And I thought we could all grieve together.” Sue remembered, “There were flowers, and Dylan’s and Eric’s crosses had as many as everyone else’s.” Then the parents of some of the victims destroyed Dylan’s and Eric’s crosses. The youth group at a local church planted fifteen trees, only to have some of the victims’ parents arrive with a press escort to chop down Dylan’s and Eric’s trees. At the high school graduation ceremony a week later, there were encomiums for the victims, but the head of the school told friends of Dylan and Eric to make themselves scarce. Before long, reports referring to the incident started using the number thirteen rather than fifteen. “The shorthand was this,” Tom said. “Thirteen kids died. Two Nazis killed them, and the parents were responsible. It was a lynch mob.” Sue said reflectively, “I think the other parents believed they had experienced loss, and I had not, because their children were of value, and mine was not. My child died, too. He died after making a terrible decision and doing a terrible thing, but he was still my child, and he still died.”

The Klebolds’ lawyer had advised them not to talk to the press; their silence exacerbated local hostility. “You’d read something, and you couldn’t respond to it,” Tom said. “You knew that it was false, misleading, inflammatory.” Sue said, “It was just like constantly being hit, and being hit again. And you couldn’t fight back.” In an act of agonizing catharsis, Sue handwrote notes to the parents of each child who had died or been injured. Though she did not feel responsible for what had happened, she wanted to mitigate the devastation. “To me, the only way to heal this community was to try to have a one-to-one relationship with each of the victims,” she later explained. “My journey is not complete until I can say to these people, ‘If you ever want to speak to me, I am available to you. I will meet in your home, a pastor’s office, with a mediator if you want. If it would help you to talk to me, I’m here.’” She has never done it, because a counselor cautioned her that by contacting them, she might retraumatize them. “But I cried for their children just as I did for mine,” she said. While the Klebolds faced a great deal of hostility, moments of unusual love also surfaced. “A few weeks after Columbine happened, I got a hug from the checkout clerk at Home Depot,” Tom said. “Neighbors brought us food. And when I took my car in to have a bent wheel fixed, the mechanic said to me, ‘At least you didn’t change your name.’ He respected that.”

Investigations over the ensuing months revealed an atmosphere of bullying at Columbine. “Unless you were a part of the in crowd and had your athletic résumé, you had no status,” Tom said. “So Dylan had to be resentful. The only thing that would certainly have prevented Columbine would have been to eliminate the chip on his shoulder, and the chip sprang from that school. He and Eric didn’t shoot us, and they didn’t shoot up Kmart or a gas station; they shot up the school. The whole social pattern at Columbine was unfair, and Dylan couldn’t do anything about it. That would cause enough anger in a sensitive kid to make him retaliate.”

Unbeknownst to the Klebolds, Dylan had experienced significant humiliation at school, though he was six feet four and not easy to push around. He had come home one day with ketchup spots all over his shirt, and when his mother asked what had happened, he said he’d had the worst day of his life and didn’t want to talk about it. Months after his death, she learned of an incident in which Dylan and Eric had apparently been shoved and squirted with ketchup by kids calling them fags. “It hurt so much that I’d seen the remnants of that day and hadn’t helped him,” she said. When Tom went to pick up Dylan’s car from the police station a few weeks after the event, one of the officers said to him, “My son came home from that school one day and they’d set his hair on fire right in the hall— his whole scalp was burned. I wanted to take that school apart brick by brick, but he said it would only make it worse.”

Excerpt - Solomon, Andrew (2012-11-13)

Far from the Tree - Pt. 3 - Easy to still love him but hard to understand his choice.

A year after the massacre, the police turned over Dylan’s journals to the Klebolds, who hadn’t known of their existence. “Dylan’s writing is full of ‘I’m smarter than they are,’” Sue said. “He experienced disdain for the people who were mistreating him. He liked to think of himself as perfect, I think, and that grandiosity came through in the shootings. He started being more withdrawn and secretive in the last two years of high school, but that’s not so unusual. The stereotype that he and Eric were these miserable little kids who were plotting because they were so isolated is false. He was bright. He was very shy. He had friends, and they liked him. I was as shocked hearing that my son was perceived as an outcast as I was hearing that he’d been involved in a shooting. He cared for other people.” Tom demurred, “Or he seemed to.”

“I can never decide whether it’s worse to think your child was hardwired to be like this and that you couldn’t have done anything, or to think he was a good person and something set this off in him,” Sue said. “What I’ve learned from being an outcast since the tragedy has given me insight into what it must have felt like for my son to be marginalized. He created a version of his reality for us: to be pariahs, unpopular, with no means to defend ourselves against those who hate us.” Their attorney filtered their piles of mail so they would not see the worst of it. “I could read three hundred letters where people were saying, ‘I admire you,’ ‘I’m praying for you,’ and I’d read one hate letter and be destroyed,” Sue said. “When people devalue you, it far outweighs all the love.”

Tom, like Dylan, had been painfully shy in high school and felt that because of their similarities he knew Dylan instinctively; he can identify with how Dylan may have felt, but not with what he did. Sue sees a terrible confluence of circumstances including depression, a school environment that caused rage, and an influential friend who had severe problems. “Dylan felt a little afraid of Eric, a little protective of him, and a little controlled by him,” she said. “He was caught in something I don’t understand that made him do this horrible thing. But I don’t, can’t, believe that that is who he was. Yes, he made a conscious choice and did this horrible thing, but what had happened to his consciousness that he would make such a choice? Something in him got broken. The same pathology that killed and hurt all the others also killed my son.”

I was surprised that the Klebolds had stayed in the town where they had been party to so much anguish. “If we had moved and changed our names, the press would have figured it out,” Sue said. “I would have been ‘the mother of that killer’ in the eyes of everyone I met. Here at least I had people who liked me as me, and people who had liked Dylan, and that was what I needed— especially people who had liked Dylan.” Tom said bluntly, “If we’d left, they would have won. Staying was my defiance of the people who were trying to grind us into the ground.” I ventured that it must have been hard to keep loving Dylan through the aftermath, and Sue replied, “No, it never was. That was the easy part. Trying to understand was hard, coping with the loss was hard, reconciling myself to the consequences of his actions was hard, but loving him— no, that was always easy for me.”

It seemed to me, as I talked to the Klebolds, that Sue was Germany and Tom was Japan. Sue was intensely introspective and burdened with terrific guilt, while Tom proclaimed that it was horrible and then tried to move on. “What are you going to do?” he said. “He felt that he had a reason. He suffered the ultimate: he’s no longer here. I’m sorry for the pain my son caused other people, but we had more than our share of pain in this, too. We lost our son; then we had to live with his memory being attacked.” Like Japan, he also externalized the causes, but only to a point. “I imagined Eric telling him, ‘If you don’t do this, I will come and kill your parents,’” Tom later said. “But Dylan’s willingness to participate is inescapable.” Sue believes that Dylan would have been able to foil pressure from Eric if that had been the pivotal factor. She has wondered whether he might have endured some precipitating trauma, even if he’d been raped by someone, but has never found any evidence to that effect. In writings that go back to his sophomore year, she said, “He talks like a thoughtful, introspective, depressed kid, mostly about how he has a crush on somebody, and she doesn’t know he’s alive. Three months before the tragedy he’s talking about how he wants to die, and he says, ‘I might do an NBK with Eric.’” She learned that NBK stood for Natural Born Killers. “So as late as January, Dylan hadn’t really decided that he was going to do this. He just wanted to die. But why blow up the school? I get in my car on a Monday morning, and I start thinking about Dylan, and I just cry all the way to work. I talk to him, or I sing songs. You have to be in touch with that sorrow.”

An event of such enormity completely disrupts one’s sense of reality. “I used to think I could understand people, relate, and read them pretty well,” Sue said. “After this, I realized I don’t have a clue what another human being is thinking. We read our children fairy tales and teach them that there are good guys and bad guys. I would never do that now. I would say that every one of us has the capacity to be good and the capacity to make poor choices. If you love someone, you have to love both the good and the bad in them.” Sue worked in a building that also housed a parole office and had felt alienated and frightened getting on the elevator with ex-convicts. After Columbine, she saw them differently. “I felt that they were just like my son. That they were just people who, for some reason, had made an awful choice and were thrown into a terrible, despairing situation. When I hear about terrorists in the news, I think, ‘That’s somebody’s kid.’ Columbine made me feel more connected to mankind than anything else possibly could have.”

The Klebolds had letters from kids who idealized Dylan, and from girls who were in love with him. “He has his own groupies,” Tom said with an ironic half smile. They were heartened by unanticipated kindnesses. At a conference about suicide some years later, a man came up to Sue, knelt in front of her, and said, “I just want to tell you how much I admire you. I can’t believe the way you have been treated. Every day I picked up the paper, and I expected to read that people were coming up your driveway with pitchforks.” Sue has had strangers hug her. But the prospect of a normal life remains elusive. She recounted a recent trip to the supermarket when the checkout clerk had verified her name on her driver’s license. “And then she says, ‘Klebold  .  .  .   Did you know him?’ And I say, ‘He was my son.’ And then she started in with ‘It was the work of Satan.’ And I’m thinking, ‘Please, let’s bag the groceries here.’ As I leave the store, she’s yelling out after me about how she’s praying for me. It wears you down.”

Excerpt - Solomon, Andrew (2012-11-13)

Far from the Tree - Pt. 4 - Kids just mess up your life.

Before I went to meet Tom and Sue the first time, a friend asked me whether I was afraid of the Klebolds, as if I might succumb to some contagious evil in their house. Ultimately, what proved difficult to reckon with was their underlying normality. One of Dylan’s friends said that he used to call them Ward and June, after the sunny couple on Leave It to Beaver, because their household seemed so pleasant and predictable. They showed me family photo albums and home videos. I was particularly struck by a video of Dylan on his way to his prom, three days before the massacre. He’s a little churlish in the mode of adolescents, but also has a sweetness about him; he seems like a nice kid. It would never have occurred to me that he could be on the verge of wanton destruction. His long hair pulled back in a neat ponytail, he’s adjusting his rented tuxedo and complaining that the arms are a little short, smiling while his date puts on his boutonniere. “Dad, why are you filming this?” he asks. Then he laughs and says, “Well, someday I’ll watch it again, and I’ll wonder what I was thinking.” It was impressive dissembling, because he imparts the feeling of someone who will one day remember being dressed up, with a pretty girl, on the way to the biggest party of his life. Near the end of the video, he says, “I’ll never have kids. Kids just mess up your life.” The sudden angry moment comes out of nowhere and evaporates just as fast.

From the day of the bloodbath, April 20, until the following October, the Klebolds knew few details about what had transpired, except that Dylan was at the shooting and supposedly committed suicide. “We kept clinging to the belief that he hadn’t really killed anybody,” Sue said. Then came the police report. “It just launched my grief all over again, because I didn’t have denial anymore. They could talk about which people he’d killed. Here’s the little map of the school, with all the little bodies on it.” Then they saw the “basement tapes,” which Dylan and Eric had deliberately left behind, which reveal a Dylan unrelated to the young man in the prom video, someone spewing hatred, full of self-aggrandizing rage. “Seeing those videos was as traumatic as the original event,” Sue said. “All the protective beliefs that we’d held on to were shattered. There wasn’t hate talk in our house. I’m part Jewish, and yet the anti-Semitic stuff was there; they were going through every derogatory word: a nigger; a kike. I saw the end product of my life’s work: I had created a monster. Everything I had refused to believe was true. Dylan was a willing participant, and the massacre was not a spontaneous impulse. He had purchased and created weapons that were designed to end the lives of as many people as possible. He shot to kill. For the first time, I understood how Dylan appeared to others. When I saw his disdain for the world, I almost hated my son. I wanted to destroy the video that preserved him in that twisted and fierce mistake. From then on, no matter how lovingly he would be remembered by those who knew him, the tapes would provide a lasting contradiction to anything positive that could be said about his character. For me, it’s a smothering emptiness.” On these tapes, like the hope at the bottom of Pandora’s box, is one moment of kindness: when Eric mentions their parents, Dylan says, “My parents have been good to me. I don’t want to browse there.”

If you take Tom and Sue back to their prelapsarian memories, ease creeps into their voices. “Dylan was a marvel,” Tom recalled of his son’s early childhood. “Completely self-motivated. Curious.” Every year on Dylan’s birthday, Tom goes up to the place where the two used to hike and takes a Dr Pepper, because Dylan loved Dr. Pepper, and the stuffed koala that was Dylan’s childhood favorite. The Klebolds needed three years to clean out Dylan’s room and to remake it into the pleasant guest room in which I slept on my visits. Sue said, “He was a wonderful, marvelous, pretty-close-to-perfect child. He made you feel like a great parent, because he did everything right. Dylan had this incredible sense of organization, and structure, and all this executive functioning.” At three, he could already count to 110 and would use refrigerator magnets to make equations. He entered preschool a year early, earned top grades, and was accepted to the gifted-children program. “When he was very young, he would dump five or six puzzles into a pile, so he would have the thrill of working on them all at the same time. He liked mazes; he liked word searches. He played chess with Tom. He was just a delight.” Sue looked at me sideways, then said quietly, “You can’t imagine how long it’s been since I had a chance to brag about my son.” Later she said, “He was very malleable; you’d reason with him and say, ‘This is why I think you should do something,’ and you could almost always persuade him to change his mind. Which I used to see as a strength, from the perspective of a parent. But I see now that it might have been a terrible detriment.”

Only one incident with Dylan, the year before the massacre, suggested something might be amiss. The spring of his junior year, Dylan had asked to spend the night at his friend Zack’s place, and when Zack had to cancel, Dylan took advantage and went driving with Eric. On their way to set off fireworks on a canyon road, they stopped at a parking lot and noticed a van with video equipment in the front seat. They grabbed a rock, broke the window, stole the equipment, then turned on their interior lights to inspect their haul. When a policeman stopped to see what was going on, Dylan confessed to the theft almost immediately, and both boys were taken to be booked. “The phone rings,” Sue said. “It was the sheriff’s department— the darkest night of our lives to that point.” They went down to the station to find Dylan and Eric in handcuffs. The police released the boys back to their parents’ custody and put them in a diversion program, which aims to help juveniles avoid a criminal record by assigning them community service, educational directives, and restitution. With hindsight, Sue believes that this putative act of mercy was a mean trick of fate; had they gone to jail, the boys would have been separated and out of the school where they felt debased.

The family didn’t get home until dawn, and Sue was so angry she couldn’t speak to Dylan. When Tom went for a walk the next day with Dylan, he was startled by his son’s fury about the arrest. “He felt so above it all, totally justified in what he’d done,” Tom said. “The morality of the whole thing escaped him.” Sue noticed a similar attitude, and the diversion record remarks that he didn’t connect to the wrongness of what he did. “I said, ‘Dylan, help me understand this,’” Sue said. “‘ How could you do something so morally wrong?’ And he said, ‘Well, I didn’t do it to another human being; it was to a company. That’s what they have insurance for.’ And I said, ‘Dylan! You’re scaring me!’ He said, ‘Well, it scared me, too, because I don’t know why I did it. Just, suddenly, we’d done it.’ His mother chalked it up to teenage impulse and made him promise that he would never do anything of the sort again. “He said, ‘I promise. But I’m scared, because I didn’t know I was going to do it this time.’ So I said, ‘Well, now you know.’”

Excerpt - Solomon, Andrew (2012-11-13

Far from the Tree - Pt. 5 - Forever Dylan’s Mother

Sue asked the people in the diversion program whether Dylan needed counseling, and they administered standardized psychological tests and found no indication that he was suicidal, homicidal, or depressed. “If I could say something to a roomful of parents right now, I would say, ‘Never trust what you see,’” Sue said. “Was he nice? Was he thoughtful? I was taking a walk not long before he died, and I’d asked him, ‘Come and pick me up if it rains.’ And he did. He was there for you, and he was the best listener I ever met. I realize now that that was because he didn’t want to talk, and he was hiding. He and Eric worked together at the pizza parlor. A couple of weeks before Columbine, Eric’s beloved dog was sick, and it looked like he wasn’t going to make it, and so Dylan worked Eric’s shift as well as his own so that Eric could have the time with his dog.”

In the writing Dylan and Eric left behind, Eric comes off as homicidal; his anger is all directed outward. Dylan comes off as suicidal; his energy fuels self-abnegation and self-criticism.  self-criticism. It’s as though Dylan went along with the homicide for Eric’s sake, and Eric with the suicide for Dylan’s. Toward the end, Dylan was counting the hours he had left. “How could he keep it so secret,” Sue wondered, “this pain he was in?”

When I asked the Klebolds what they would want to ask Dylan if he were in the room with us, Tom said, “I’d ask him what the hell he was thinking and what the hell he thought he was doing!” Sue looked down at the floor for a minute before saying quietly, “I would ask him to forgive me, for being his mother and never knowing what was going on inside his head, for not being able to help him, for not being the person that he could confide in.” Later she said, “I’ve had thousands of dreams about Dylan where I’m talking to him and trying to get him to tell me how he feels. I dreamed that I was getting him ready for bed, and I lifted up his shirt, and he was covered with cuts. And he was in all this pain, and I didn’t see it; it was hidden.”

The Klebolds were caught in lawsuits brought by some victims’ families. Four years after the tragedy, they were deposed— supposedly confidentially— in front of these parents. The next day, the Denver paper contended that the world had a right to know what they had said. “It was implying, after all that we’d been through, that they still believed we were at fault,” Sue said. “It was, ‘How could you not know? How could you not know?’ And it’s like, ‘I can’t answer that. I didn’t know, I didn’t know, I didn’t know. How many times can you say that? Why would we have known and not gotten help, not told anyone?”

In the wake of so many enormous stresses, Sue was diagnosed with breast cancer. “I don’t believe in chakras,” she said. “But you think about all this heart pain, and failed nurturing, and losing a child. I finally had an opportunity to meet some women who had lost children to suicide. There were six women, and three of us have had breast cancer. I used to laugh and say it was my version of comic relief. Because after all we’d been through, the breast cancer seemed like sort of a nice, normal thing.” For two years after the maelstrom of Columbine, she thought that she wanted to die, but now she was jarred into a new sense of purpose. “It was like, ‘Wait a minute! I have something I have to do first. I have to explain who Dylan was and what he was like.’ I met a woman recently who had lost one son to suicide and whose other son was in jail, and I said to her, ‘You can’t appreciate or believe this now, but if you plunge deep into this, it will lead you to enlightenment. It’s not the path you would have chosen, but it will make you a better and stronger person.’”

After Columbine, Sue had a client who was blind, had only one hand, had just lost her job, and was facing trouble at home. “She said, ‘I may have my problems, but I wouldn’t trade places with you for anything in the world.’ I laughed. All those years I have worked with people with disabilities and thought, ‘Thank God I can see; thank God I can walk; thank God I can scratch my head and feed myself.’ And I’m thinking how funny it is how we all use one another to feel better.”

Sue spoke of herself as a lucky person. “I was fortunate that Dylan did not turn on us. The worst thing he did to us was he took himself away from us. After Columbine, I felt that Dylan killed God. No god could have had anything to do with this, so there must not be one. When everything in your world is gone, all your belief systems, and your self-concepts— your beliefs in yourself, your child, your family— there is a process of trying to establish, who am I? Is there a person there, at all? A woman at work asked me recently how my weekend was, and it happened to be the anniversary of the shootings. So I said that I wasn’t doing so well and I told her why, and she said, ‘I always forget that about you.’ I gave her a hug and said, ‘That’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me in years.’” But Sue does not forget. “I sat next to someone on a train a while ago and we had a really wonderful conversation, and then I could feel the questions coming—‘ So, how many kids do you have?’ I had to forestall it. I had to tell him who I was. And who I am forever now is Dylan’s mother.”

When I mentioned to the Klebolds that I thought they spoke with an extraordinary clarity about their situation, in contrast to some of the other people I had interviewed for this chapter, Tom said, “We are able to be open and honest about those things because our son is dead. His story is complete. We can’t hope for him to do something else, something better. You can tell a story a whole lot better when you know its ending.” A few years after we first met, Sue said to me, “Way back when, we almost got a house in California, and our offer was turned down, and this house in Littleton came up, we made a low offer, and we were so thrilled when it was accepted. At the time we said how lucky we were that the house in California hadn’t worked out. But if it had, Columbine wouldn’t have happened. When it first happened, I used to wish that I had never had children, that I had never married. If Tom and I hadn’t crossed paths at Ohio State, Dylan wouldn’t have existed and this terrible thing wouldn’t have happened. But over time, I’ve come to feel that, for myself, I am glad I had kids and glad I had the kids I did, because the love for them— even at the price of this pain— has been the single greatest joy of my life. When I say that, I am speaking of my own pain, and not of the pain of other people. But I accept my own pain; life is full of suffering, and this is mine. I know it would have been better for the world if Dylan had never been born. But I believe it would not have been better for me.

End.

Excerpt - Solomon, Andrew (2012-11-13)

thanks for posting that

That was so sweet of the home depot clerk. I didn't know Sue had breast cancer. What an inspirational woman.