Sue Klebold, A Mother's Reckoning -- A Book Review

image from amazon.com 

A Mother's Reckoning is a hard book to read. Not because the language is difficult or the structure hard to follow.  It is because it's about a subject none of us wants to think about. Mass murder. And more difficult yet is child-on-child mass murder.

Dylan Klebold aged 17 and Eric Harris age 18 shot and killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded 20 others before killing themselves at Columbine High School, April 20, 1999. They were seniors at the 2,000 student high school located in Littleton, Colorado, a suburb southwest of Denver.

In April of 1999 my son was 24, living in Texas with his beautiful wife and expecting their first child, my first grandchild. My husband and I were living in Southeast Arkansas, busy trying to keep our business afloat. My daughter was nine years old and dealing with the vagaries of elementary school.

Four years earlier, almost to the day of the Columbine tragedy, I was living in El Reno, Oklahoma, a suburb of Oklahoma City.

On April 19, 1995 Timothy McVeigh bombed the Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. One hundred sixty-eight people died there and almost 700 were injured.

My credit union was in that building. I had been in the building less than two weeks before the bombing. Many of my friends worked there. I watched the extensive TV coverage looking for people I knew. Wanting to see them alive. Walking. Outside the devastated building. My son was just finishing EMT training. My tender-hearted son was somewhere down in that destruction, helping.

Nine years before that, a man opened fire in the post office of another Oklahoma City suburb where I lived. Edmond. He killed 15 people including himself.

Edmond was my hometown. I was driving past the area while it was going on. Police and fire department vehicles blocked my regular route to work. Helicopters circled the area. I didn't find out what was happening until I got to work.

My little town. My quiet, little college town. I graduated from high school there. My grandparents had lived there. I don't remember ever hearing about a murder there before that day.

Already tenuous at best, any sense of security that had survived into my adulthood was shattered.

The tragedy at Columbine took up only a minimal amount of news time in Southeast Arkansas. During the few days that followed, I read the articles that appeared in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Arkansas's major state-wide newspaper. I did not see any television coverage of it.

It was far away from me and my life. I had my own mass murder events. 

Now I live in Colorado.

In January, my walking group walked around the lake in Clement Park. Columbine High School is located on the east side of the park. It's just over a rise so you can't see it from the lake, but my fellow walkers pointed out the memorial area and talked a little about the shooting.

And last week, as I listened to Colorado Public Radio I heard interviews with Sue Klebold about her recently released book A Mother's Reckoning. 

listen to the interview or read the transcript here

This mass murder became much more real to me. And it brought up my need to understand. A need that I'd felt especially strongly with the Edmond Post Office shootings. A need that I'd filed away somewhere in the back of my mind with the belief that they were irrational acts by irrational people and could never be understood.

In her interview, Klebold came across as a calm, rational, person who'd done research into the possible cause or causes of her son's rampage. I wanted to know what she'd learned. Was there a rational explanation? Could it apply to the inconceivable acts that have affected my life? Could these murderous episodes be prevented in the future?


Sue Klebold lost her son. She lost her son on so many levels. A son she had loved and been proud of. A son she had nurtured and watched grow from birth to a 6-foot-4 young man. A son she thought she knew.

But she didn't know the deeply disturbed young man who helped build bombs and planted them in his school intending to destroy the building and kill as many people as possible. She did not know the high school senior who used a gun to kill his fellow students. She did not know the architect of a murder-suicide living in her own house.

She does not discount the horrendous nature of the murders and maimings, but she has come to believe that his action was one primarily of suicide. He went to the school and did those horrible things planning to die.

Of suicide, she says,
         "Even after more than ten years as a suicide prevention activist, I still find the general
         public's ignorance about [suicide] staggering."
         "Almost everything I knew about suicide was wrong. [People who] tried to kill themselves
         were selfish or too cowardly to face their problems, or captive to a passing impulse."
         "According to the CDC, suicide is the third leading cause of death among people aged
         10-14, and the second among people aged 15-34."

What suicide actually is:
         "Suicidal thought is a symptom of illness, of something else gone wrong. A suicidal person
         is someone who is unable to tolerate their suffering any longer."

In Dylan's case depression and anger.

In 1999 she "did not know the difference between the sadness and lethargy I had always called depression and clinical depression which many sufferers describe as a feeling of nothingness." She notes a recent CDC report that close to 30% of teenagers experience a depressive episode.
   
As with many suicides, the people around Dylan had no idea what he was planning with Eric Harris. Klebold does not speak for the Harrises. Apparently, they knew their son was having trouble, but they were getting him help. He was in therapy. Again Klebold does not say, but I assume that Eric's therapist also did not see the danger.

From her first attendance at a suicide prevention conference Sue Klebold came away with three realizations:
"One: There is more to suicide prevention than loving someone and telling them so.
Two: Many of us [the loss-by-suicide survivors] believed there were no signs of trouble....we hadn't recognized indicators of potential risk....we hadn't even known there was cause to be on heightened alert.
Three: ...while there are effective interventions for depression and other risk factors for suicide, we cannot yet rely on their effectiveness."

She explains that symptoms of depression in adults can be sadness and low-energy. In teens (especially boys) "they may withdraw, show increased irritability, self-criticism, frustration, and anger." In younger children, depression may present as "unexplained pains, whininess,sleep disorders, and clinginess."

With teens and younger children it's too easy to chalk these things up to being in a phase.

She encourages us to listen to our children -- not just as interested and supportive parents, but be probing. Pay attention to their friends. Pay attention to their interactions with their friends. Be sensitive to changes in their behavior. If there are changes, be nosy. Check their rooms. Read their journals. Know their internet activities.

And, you know what, pay attention to your adult family members and your close friends. Certainly not all depressives end up committing suicide or murder, but don't we need to do what we can to help people close to us through those hard times?

Klebold talks about ramifications of this tragedy, both immediate and long-term. Things I never thought about.

Her close family and friends, and Dylan's friends who were not involved in the shooting were at risk from distressed people in the community.

She understands distraught families and friends of the victims holding her son's actions against the family, but they received death threats from people far and wide not involved in or directly affected by the tragedy. Even a distant relative who lives outside of Colorado and had never had contact with Dylan, received death threats because his name is Klebold.

Sue and her husband had to have Dylan cremated, because burying him would have subjected not only his grave to probable desecration but other graves in the cemetery.

She was terrified that her other son might commit suicide under the weight of this situation. There was the very real possibility that her husband could choose to die. That she could choose to die.

In addition to losing a beloved son in these horrific circumstances, they were sued by their son's victims' families. Those lawsuits took more than four years to settle and during that time, Sue Klebold could not attend a support group.

I'm a big proponent of support groups. People who have been through the same or a similar experience can be a great help. And unfortunately, many people have lost loved ones to suicide and murder-suicide. But she could not benefit from a support group because the other people attending the might be called to testify in the lawsuits.

Was there a rational explanation? I think the book helps me understand a little bit about Dylan.

Maybe even about Patrick Sherrill, the man who shot the people in the Edmond Post Office, then shot himself.

And now that I think about it, I must reconsider the man who murdered my friend Sue many years ago. He was her husband. He killed her, then himself leaving their infant son to grow up without them.

And can we prevent like events? I think we must try.

The Oklahoma City Bombing, 20 Years After

This was the first spontaneous memorial.

This is what it looked like the first time I visited it.

Image from zforwebhosting.com

Someone said there was an explosion at the Federal Building.

The hydrologist had just hung up from a call to the Oklahoma State Water Resources Board. Their offices were across the street from the Alfred P. Murrah Building in downtown Oklahoma City.

We were in the Chickasha office of the Natural Resources Conservation Service, a part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Our office mapped flood plains throughout Oklahoma, tested soil, monitored biodiversity in the state’s wetlands – in general, we collected and provided information to other Federal agencies, to state and local agencies, and to private individuals and businesses. Chickasha is about 40 miles southwest of Oklahoma City, as the crow flies.

I lived just south of El Reno, Oklahoma, and drove the 30 miles to Chickasha four days a week. My husband and I conducted most of our business in Oklahoma City, 25 miles east of our home. We banked at the Federal Employees’ Credit Union located in the Federal Building. My husband was a newly minted Veterinarian with Canadian Valley Animal Clinic in El Reno.

I give you all these miles and locations so you can see how we relate to what happened in Oklahoma City that 19th day of April, twenty years ago.

Connections between Federal Agencies and State and Local Agencies are numerous and intricate throughout the United States. Consequently, although we don’t know everybody in Federal service, we all know somebody in most parts of the country. And because in Oklahoma time and distance feels different from back east or out west, if you’re within about forty miles of Oklahoma City, it’s all the same neighborhood.

That morning in our office, we called our State Office in Stillwater. We turned on radios. We tried to call people we knew in the Federal Building. We were all trying to find out what happened.

Then someone heard it was a bomb. Speculation went through the office. Someone might have been mad at the Social Security Administration. They had an office in the Federal Building. Where were the FBI offices? No, it couldn’t be them. They had an office at 50 Penn Place, not downtown. (I’d gone there to get my fingerprints done when I first took a job with the Ag Department.)

How could someone have gotten a bomb into the building? In a brief case? A package sent to some poor soul working there?

Then someone brought a television in and we saw pictures. Very early pictures from news helicopters flying in the area.

My God. The whole front of the building was gone.

We couldn’t believe it had been a bomb. It had to have been a huge natural gas leak. What kind of bomb could do that?

What was I looking at on that television screen? The credit union was on the third floor toward the 5th Street side of the building. That part of the building was gone.

The day care? Two weeks before I had taken my daughter with me to the credit union. As we always did, we parked under the building. We got there just as the day care kids were coming back from some outing. They were in eight- or ten-seat strollers, three of them. It looked like a train coming into the underground parking. My daughter who was five watched all those children being wheeled in those long strollers. She was amazed. I’d never seen industrial-sized strollers either. But I could see how much safer that was than trying to get all those little kids holding hands, two-by-two, safely along the sidewalks in downtown traffic.

The day care was gone, too. Where were those children we’d seen two weeks before? I hoped  they were somewhere safe in their strollers far from that smoking shell of a building.

I tried to call my friends Arlanna and Renee. They worked for HUD (Housing and Urban Development) on the seventh floor. I looked hard at the pictures on the television. Tried to count the floors. It looked like HUD was gone, too.

This was before cell phones. Our only hope to contact people was by land-line.

Emergency people were all over the place. Oklahoma has a long history of murderous tornadoes and had just completed the annual preparedness training. They had plans already in place that directed emergency personnel from all over the state to where they should go and to whom they should report for instructions. Medical people knew which hospitals to report to and what they’d be doing. This was before the term “first responders,” but fire departments, police departments, and hospital personnel from throughout the area responded to this disaster just like they had been trained to do and had practiced every year.

I stopped calling Arlanna at her work number and called her home. I watched the TV screen as people came out of the building hoping to see her. Hoping to see the other people I knew who worked there.

I finally got Arlanna at home. She’d just left the building to go to a doctor’s appointment when it happened. She heard the explosion and saw the smoke in her review mirror. She was at home calling workmates, watching the television, and making a list of the survivors as she reached them by phone or saw them outside the building. Renee was safe and unharmed.

My son had just completed the first course of EMT training. He was called out, but he wouldn’t be 21 for five months yet and couldn’t be certified until then, so he did not transport victims. He ran errands, delivered supplies, and just did whatever they asked him to like so many did who came to help.

That evening my husband and I watched the local news as they showed over and over again Dr. Brian Espe being assisted down a firetruck ladder out of the devastation that had been his office. He was the Area Veterinarian in charge of APHIS (Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.) He lost seven of his ten employees.

HUD lost eighteen people. Eighteen children in the day care died. Twenty-one Credit Union employees died, including Claudette Meek. She helped us on numerous occasions including a loan to buy a pick-up truck.

Forty people in the Social Security Administration Office died that day. Two of those were Donna and Robert Luster. Ten years later I would go with my daughter’s high school class to visit the Memorial Museum. Carol Luster, one of the young people on that trip, was their daughter. That was my only visit to the museum.

There were a total of 168 identified victims of the bombing.

I’ve been to the Memorial three times. Once before it was a memorial, then with the school class, and the last time was when my husband ran his first marathon, The Oklahoma City Memorial Marathon is held every year as a remembrance for the people who died there.

This is the first time I’ve written about the bombing. My cousin’s wife blogged about it two days ago. You can read Debbie's post  here. And my daughter-in-law shared a blog post about it from Dan. Read Dan's post at  Science is OK.

Debbie’s piece got me to thinking about writing about that day. Dan’s piece inspired me to comment on his blog and that got me started writing about it. I ended my comment on Dan’s post with:

“That was a terrible day. So many of us lost so much. Maybe one of the greatest losses was the loss of the world as we understood it. A world where we in our unspectacular Oklahoma City were safe from that kind of hate and violence. But, you show that we gained a new world, one where we speak out against the senseless disaffection we humans can feel for each other. A world where we teach each other to respect differences. And, maybe best of all, a world where we show love every opportunity to those closest to us and too often overlooked by us. Maybe today's the day for me to write about it, too.

And today is the day.

Stay safe out there, wherever you are. Be kind to the people you meet and hug the people you love every chance you get.

November 22, 1963 -- November 22, 2013

 President Kennedy's Grave

with the Lincoln Memorial in the background

 

   I knew this year would be worse than last year or eleven years ago or forty-three years ago. I knew the media would fill the days leading to my birthday with questions and comments and constant reprise of the Zapruder film. That's right. My birthday.
   Sometimes Thanksgiving falls on my birthday, but the anniversary of President Kennedy's murder always falls on my birthday.
   November 22, 1963, my sixteenth birthday. My world was already dangerous. We were in the middle of the Cold War. My best friend's father had flown in the Berlin Airlift several years before and we had been afraid a Third World War would start then. President Kennedy had threatened the Soviet Union if they did not remove their missiles from Cuba. And we had been afraid of nuclear war then. Women's magazines had recipes and diets and articles about home bomb shelters. We had tornado drills at school and bomb drills.
   Fear was already a backdrop for my life. But like other almost-sixteen-year-olds, backdrops are just that. Mind catching each time they change, but quickly moved to the background as the activities of  life took center stage. And each time the scary moment passed, somehow my sense of security was recovered and all the dangers of the world receded.
   And then a man murdered President Kennedy. An English-speaking, white American whom I would not have recognized as different from my neighbors or me had I met him on November 21, 1963. And he did it in Dallas, Texas, a city more like my Oklahoma City than any other major American city. It was too close to home. It would not recede into any background.
   The murder of President Kennedy was the end of my sense of security, just as Pearl Harbor must have been the end of my parents' and the murder of President Lincoln must have been for Walt Whitman's generation and the burning of Washington, D.C., must have been for the young people of the War of 1812.
   Each of us must surely come to the realization that the concept of 'security' is false. That the concept of ideal is illusion. For me it came with the assassination of JFK. For my son it was probably the Oklahoma City bombing. For my daughter, fifteen years younger than my son, it was September 11. I don't know what it will be for my grandchildren, but it will surely happen. And the event will be just as shocking and just as threatening. It will not recede into a backdrop but become the next layer of tragedy on which our human condition rises.
   For every tragedy that reminds us how fragile and flawed we humans are, there are countless triumphs. The English burned our capital city, but with each generation we come closer to achieving a class-free society. And truly, so do those English and the rest of the world. President Lincoln was murdered and freedom and equality for all may have been delayed, but with each generation we come closer. And Pearl Harbor did not begin the end of human civilization, but began the end of another in the list of tyrants who would subjugate humanity. A long list that each generation faces.
   I gave up on security and ideals a long time ago. Fifty years ago, to be precise. But I do not give up on humanity. And hope is a great replacement for security.