Sue Klebold
Benefitting the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention
It’s been more than 20 years since Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine High School and killed and injured dozens of people before taking his own life. Since the loss of her son, Sue Klebold committed the next decades of her life to the research of brain health, violence, and suicide prevention. In this episode, Sue not only shares about the moment she learned of her son's death and his final act, but she also shares thoughtful and practical solutions that she believes can help put an end to school shootings in this country, beginning with the key distinction between asking why these things happen, and instead asking how they happen.
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Wise Words
I remember asking the DR counselor, I don't know what this means. This is all different. I've never seen any of these behaviors before, could he need counseling? And I remember the diversion counselor turning to him and saying, Dylan, do you think you need counseling? And of course, as a, as a 16 year old boy, he said, no, I don't need counseling. I will prove to you that I'm fine. And the last 14 months of his life, he did go out of his way to prove to us that he was fine.
The hard thing to remember about this is that Dylan did not present as someone who was dangerous or terribly angry or someone to be feared. He was just sort of an easy going quiet kid. And in the last days of his life, he went to a prom with his friends.
He came home from the prom early in the morning. And he talked to me and thanked me for sending him and said, he'd had the best time he'd ever had in his life. And then that was a Saturday, three days later, he was dead and he had killed all those people and injured them. And I was totally, totally confused, overwrought. I didn't understand any of it. I couldn't understand how he got to where he got at the end of his life.
And then he got back on the phone and he said, there's some kind of a shooting at the school. Some gunman are killing people or shooting people. And they think they have trench coats. And Dylan was one of the kids that had a trench coat and he said, I've looked and I can't find his coat. And he said, they think Dylan may be one of the shooters.
My son was a killer and he took the lives of innocent people. He injured innocent people to the extent that they will have disabilities for the rest of their lives. And the fact that I am even being interviewed for some might be offensive.
But I do know as the mother of someone who did what Dylan did, you know, it is very hard to be hated. It is very hard to have your child hated and maligned. And that's just all part of this long and difficult grief process.
I'd see funerals for other children. I'd see grieving parents. I'd see, people by someone's bedside, in a hospital, trying to hope that an individual survived the shooting. To know that your child was responsible for something like that and to know that you raised this child. I don't even know how to describe that feeling. It is humiliating.
And you know, what I have come to learn is to try to help people understand that what we believe about our loved ones, the people in our lives may not be true at all. That we can't necessarily trust behaviors that we see, that when people are in distress, they go out of their way to try to hide some of those feelings.
And that is part of what we as loss survivors do, especially if our loved ones have died by suicide, we feel that we should have done something different to save them, to stop them, to know what they were thinking. To say those magic words to get them to a different place. So they didn't feel the pain that they were feeling.
And I could see in his writings that even at the age of 15, he was talking about that his life was an agony. He was talking about cutting himself. He was talking about, wishing he could get a gun and he could die. And he was expressing these suicidal thoughts. And I had the opportunity to look at my own journals because I was a journaler. And at the same time those feelings were going on. I might be writing in my journal we had a great day. We all watched the Superbowl together. We all took a hike and it was a juxtaposition to see that when normal things were going on in our family, things that I thought indicated everything was fine. He was truly suffering. He was writing about wanting to die.
I think as parents, we are so uncomfortable when our children are unhappy that we do everything we can to make them feel better. We try to fix things. We get them appointments with the individuals in their lives who can help them. And that's all good. It's not a bad thing. But the important thing is to sit in silence and just give them an opportunity to express what they're feeling.
I will never really fully understand how my son, someone that I raised, someone who was kind and loving thoughtful could do what he did
In a classroom of about 30 kids, the chances are that at least two of those kids or maybe 2.5 will have been thinking about a suicide plan within the last year.
Every piece of society holds some responsibility to recognize when someone is in distress, to know how to help them, to know how to ask questions and to listen and to refer.
The really important question to ask is not why it happens, but how it happens
If we ask how these things happen, we equip ourselves better to look at the process, look at the systems that are in place to support someone who is experiencing this kind of distress and deterioration in their thinking. And we can intervene and we can find places where we can identify what's happening and get someone to the help that they need before it's too late to help them.
The one thing that I have struggled with the most is forgiving myself.
I had a child who died at 17 years old and life has gone on and he hasn't, he stayed frozen in time at 17, but those years with him enriched my life. They were so valuable to me that, I mostly just feel gratitude that I had him at all.
I want people to understand that love is not enough, that when people we love are troubled, when they are not able to help themselves, they're going to need help from us and from others.
LINKS
Website: www.amothersreckoning.com
Book: “A Mother’s Reckoning, Living In The Aftermath of Tragedy”
Charity Donation: American Foundation for Suicide Prevention