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A review by bookph1le
A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy by Sue Klebold
5.0
I was a young adult when the Columbine shooting occurred, and it was unlike anything I had ever heard of as I progressed out of the fog of my teen years and started to become more aware of the world around me. Since my own high school years weren't all that far behind me, and I was in college studying to work with young people, it was a hugely relevant issue to me.
At that time, much like a lot of people, I found myself condemning Eric Harris's and Dylan Klebold's parents. I wondered what kind of parents they'd been, how they could have been so unaware of what their sons had been up to. I wanted to hold them responsible for the atrocity, wanted to believe there was something they could have done to prevent it. Why? Because, like a lot of other people, I was trying to make sense of an unspeakable act and needed to believe that such acts were preventable.
It took me a lot of years to start realizing this. I had kids of my own, gained some experience working with young people. I quickly realized that the person many teens are on the outside doesn't always match up with the person they are on the inside. I saw and heard things their parents knew nothing about--which I know for a fact, because those same parents would often say to me, "My son would never..." or "My daughter doesn't do that kind of thing". I started off thinking those parents were delusional, but over time I came to understand that my own kids would probably be equally unknowable to me, that they would likely at least try to pull the wool over my eyes, and that there was a good chance I would fall for it. After all, I'd been a good kid growing up, but I'd done things I knew my parents wouldn't approve of me doing, and I'd done everything in my power to make sure they didn't find out I was doing them.
This is what made me want to read this book. I was curious about what Sue Klebold's life had been like, how she made sense of what her son did. I no longer condemned her, because I've learned enough and experienced enough to know that parents can't always be held accountable for their kids' actions. That, right there, may be the scariest part of parenting. You bring a child into the world, do your best to raise them right, but at the end of the day they are their own human being, an individual person with thoughts and motives of their own. They are not an imprint of you, for good or for ill.
While I read this book, my overwhelming emotion was empathy. It poured out of me with almost every word I read. Never once does Sue Klebold attempt to defend or excuse her son's actions, nor does she try to paint herself as a perfect parent. Like all parents, she's flawed. She writes of her deep love for her son, a love that hasn't abated in light of what he did. She reviles his actions, but he is still the child she carried, the child she bore, the child she raised, and my heart broke with imagining how it felt to be in her shoes. Her son not only died, he killed people before he killed himself, and there are so many layers to that kind of grief that I don't even want to think of what would be required to find your way through to the other side of it.
Did she miss things? Maybe, but hindsight it always perfect, isn't it? With time and knowledge of what ultimately happened, she does look back, combing over her memories of her son, what she wrote in her journal of her family interactions, and she finds things that she missed. I honestly believe that a lot of other people would have missed them too. When she saw a problem, she and her husband did their best to address it, and, as it turns out, Dylan apparently was quite skilled at making them believe the problem had been resolved.
In writing this review, I don't want to make any of this sound as though Sue Klebold is attempting to convince the reader of her point of view. This book makes it obvious she did a tremendous amount of grueling, agonizing soul-searching. The burden Dylan Klebold left his parents to bear is unspeakable, and I found myself wondering if he'd ever even stopped to think of them and what they would have to go through. Yet that's kind of a dumb question. He didn't seem to spare much thought for the people he killed. It seems he was so far gone, so lost in the downward spiral of his own sense of despair that he didn't think of others. Instead, he was focused on escaping his own torment, and the end results are obvious and tragic.
The thing is, when you read this book, you realize how futile the search for answers can be. As Sue Klebold says toward the end of the book, asking "why" isn't all that constructive. Asking "how" is better. Human beings have a need to sort through the chaos and try to impose some sort of order on it, but that's often a pointless waste of time. Sue Klebold agonized over the why, but arrived at a point where she concluded that it's a question that can never be answered, because the only person who could answer it--her son--is gone. It's seductively reassuring to think that by making sense of an event, we can ensure it doesn't happen, but that's an illusion. It's terrifying to think that people are capable of atrocities, so it's easier to chalk them up to bad parenting or violent video games or any of the myriad of other reasons that are used whenever crimes like these occur. In doing so, we reassure ourselves that we're safe, that they can't happen to us, because we're more vigilant or we make our kids eat broccoli or we don't allow them to play video games. The human brain is designed for this kind of self-comfort, but this kind of self-comfort does nothing to stop these things from happening. By focusing on the "how", as Sue Klebold suggests, maybe we can find the links in the chain that will enable us to take meaningful action.
This book had a profound effect on me. Empathy is such a hard thing to feel because it reminds us that we're weak, that we're vulnerable, that we're capable of bad thoughts and bad actions. But without empathy, how can we learn and grow and rise above our baser impulses?
I didn't get the sense that Sue Klebold made sense of her tragedy. How could she? But I think it's obvious in reading her book that she has thought about it endlessly since it happened. Thinking about it gave her a new drive in life, to learn and to do, and she's translated that into passionate work on suicide prevention and advocating for a better understanding of brain health and illnesses. Her book offers some startling insights into behaviors that may be indicative of people in distress, behaviors many of us may be prone to write off as par for the course when it comes to teenagers. This book is scary and deeply disturbing, both because of what Dylan did and because it forces the reader to acknowledge the darker sides of human nature. Yet reading it is important because it shines a light on issues that need illuminating. It made me think a great deal about my own parenting, about things I might be doing wrong, and about how I can try to do a better job of listening to my kids and watching them for warning signs.
Reading this book made me extremely emotional, and writing this review is no less an emotional experience for me. That makes it a struggle for me to find the right words. To Sue Klebold, I'm sorry I entertained the thoughts about you that I once did. I appreciate so much that you wrote this book, that you shared your pain and let someone like me poke into the private corners of your life so that I could learn what to watch for in my own children. And I'm grateful that you helped me develop a greater sense of empathy.
At that time, much like a lot of people, I found myself condemning Eric Harris's and Dylan Klebold's parents. I wondered what kind of parents they'd been, how they could have been so unaware of what their sons had been up to. I wanted to hold them responsible for the atrocity, wanted to believe there was something they could have done to prevent it. Why? Because, like a lot of other people, I was trying to make sense of an unspeakable act and needed to believe that such acts were preventable.
It took me a lot of years to start realizing this. I had kids of my own, gained some experience working with young people. I quickly realized that the person many teens are on the outside doesn't always match up with the person they are on the inside. I saw and heard things their parents knew nothing about--which I know for a fact, because those same parents would often say to me, "My son would never..." or "My daughter doesn't do that kind of thing". I started off thinking those parents were delusional, but over time I came to understand that my own kids would probably be equally unknowable to me, that they would likely at least try to pull the wool over my eyes, and that there was a good chance I would fall for it. After all, I'd been a good kid growing up, but I'd done things I knew my parents wouldn't approve of me doing, and I'd done everything in my power to make sure they didn't find out I was doing them.
This is what made me want to read this book. I was curious about what Sue Klebold's life had been like, how she made sense of what her son did. I no longer condemned her, because I've learned enough and experienced enough to know that parents can't always be held accountable for their kids' actions. That, right there, may be the scariest part of parenting. You bring a child into the world, do your best to raise them right, but at the end of the day they are their own human being, an individual person with thoughts and motives of their own. They are not an imprint of you, for good or for ill.
While I read this book, my overwhelming emotion was empathy. It poured out of me with almost every word I read. Never once does Sue Klebold attempt to defend or excuse her son's actions, nor does she try to paint herself as a perfect parent. Like all parents, she's flawed. She writes of her deep love for her son, a love that hasn't abated in light of what he did. She reviles his actions, but he is still the child she carried, the child she bore, the child she raised, and my heart broke with imagining how it felt to be in her shoes. Her son not only died, he killed people before he killed himself, and there are so many layers to that kind of grief that I don't even want to think of what would be required to find your way through to the other side of it.
Did she miss things? Maybe, but hindsight it always perfect, isn't it? With time and knowledge of what ultimately happened, she does look back, combing over her memories of her son, what she wrote in her journal of her family interactions, and she finds things that she missed. I honestly believe that a lot of other people would have missed them too. When she saw a problem, she and her husband did their best to address it, and, as it turns out, Dylan apparently was quite skilled at making them believe the problem had been resolved.
In writing this review, I don't want to make any of this sound as though Sue Klebold is attempting to convince the reader of her point of view. This book makes it obvious she did a tremendous amount of grueling, agonizing soul-searching. The burden Dylan Klebold left his parents to bear is unspeakable, and I found myself wondering if he'd ever even stopped to think of them and what they would have to go through. Yet that's kind of a dumb question. He didn't seem to spare much thought for the people he killed. It seems he was so far gone, so lost in the downward spiral of his own sense of despair that he didn't think of others. Instead, he was focused on escaping his own torment, and the end results are obvious and tragic.
The thing is, when you read this book, you realize how futile the search for answers can be. As Sue Klebold says toward the end of the book, asking "why" isn't all that constructive. Asking "how" is better. Human beings have a need to sort through the chaos and try to impose some sort of order on it, but that's often a pointless waste of time. Sue Klebold agonized over the why, but arrived at a point where she concluded that it's a question that can never be answered, because the only person who could answer it--her son--is gone. It's seductively reassuring to think that by making sense of an event, we can ensure it doesn't happen, but that's an illusion. It's terrifying to think that people are capable of atrocities, so it's easier to chalk them up to bad parenting or violent video games or any of the myriad of other reasons that are used whenever crimes like these occur. In doing so, we reassure ourselves that we're safe, that they can't happen to us, because we're more vigilant or we make our kids eat broccoli or we don't allow them to play video games. The human brain is designed for this kind of self-comfort, but this kind of self-comfort does nothing to stop these things from happening. By focusing on the "how", as Sue Klebold suggests, maybe we can find the links in the chain that will enable us to take meaningful action.
This book had a profound effect on me. Empathy is such a hard thing to feel because it reminds us that we're weak, that we're vulnerable, that we're capable of bad thoughts and bad actions. But without empathy, how can we learn and grow and rise above our baser impulses?
I didn't get the sense that Sue Klebold made sense of her tragedy. How could she? But I think it's obvious in reading her book that she has thought about it endlessly since it happened. Thinking about it gave her a new drive in life, to learn and to do, and she's translated that into passionate work on suicide prevention and advocating for a better understanding of brain health and illnesses. Her book offers some startling insights into behaviors that may be indicative of people in distress, behaviors many of us may be prone to write off as par for the course when it comes to teenagers. This book is scary and deeply disturbing, both because of what Dylan did and because it forces the reader to acknowledge the darker sides of human nature. Yet reading it is important because it shines a light on issues that need illuminating. It made me think a great deal about my own parenting, about things I might be doing wrong, and about how I can try to do a better job of listening to my kids and watching them for warning signs.
Reading this book made me extremely emotional, and writing this review is no less an emotional experience for me. That makes it a struggle for me to find the right words. To Sue Klebold, I'm sorry I entertained the thoughts about you that I once did. I appreciate so much that you wrote this book, that you shared your pain and let someone like me poke into the private corners of your life so that I could learn what to watch for in my own children. And I'm grateful that you helped me develop a greater sense of empathy.