My heart goes out to the families of the victims — all of them, including the traumatized children who saw their classmates die, who had to run from a building that should have been a safe haven.
And we owe it to those children to be angry. To face our nation’s problems with violence, guns and a pathetic mental health system with clear eyes.
Enough.
There is one sentence in the O Magazine article by Susan Klebold that resonants with me like no other. When discussing her feelings as she learned more about her son’s terrible actions on that fateful day at Columbine, she writes: “I concluded that he must not have loved me, because love would have prevented him from doing what he did.”
This reaction is natural after experiencing a tragedy that was caused by a loved one’s own hands. It doesn’t require a event as devastating as Columbine to feel the shock and horror associated with suicide or murder-suicide. I also felt the same way after my mother committed suicide in my childhood home — she must not have loved me, or she never would have done that. This feeling was reinforced by the careless words of a therapist in later years, in which she expressed her shock that my mother would kill herself in our home — unusual, she said, because women are usually careful to commit suicide in an area where a family member is unlikely to be the first to find the body.
I, of course, had always wondered what it would have been like if I or my younger sister had opened the door to the garage that morning. Instead my father is the one who has to live with the image of my mother hanging from the rafters of our garage. We escaped that pain, but not the clear message that our love was not enough to keep my mother alive.
Yet more than 20 years have passed since that day, and new levels of understanding have emerged. Don’t get me wrong — like Susan Klebold, “I will never know why.” But I understand the destruction caused by mental illness a little better now than I did at 17, and my mother’s actions now prove to me how ill she really was. I also understand, as Susan writes in her article, that “we should also remember that even if someone is exhibiting signs of suicide risk, it may not always be possible to prevent tragedy.” Each person’s capacity for free will overrules good intentions from others. You should try to help (and I hope you do), but you may not succeed.
I suspect if Susan could talk to Dylan, he would tell her that he did love her, and that he always loved her. I think love has very little to do with his final actions. His illness was so far advanced at that point, love could not have saved him. That concept is difficult for other people to grasp. Instead they search for simple reasons to explain the unexplainable. Mental illness is not easily rationalized because, by its nature, it is irrational.
Those of us who are left behind are not given answers that will satisfy us. There is not just one event, nor is there just one action that caused the Columbine tragedy; and there is no simple solution to preventing suicide or murder-suicide. That’s a very uncomfortable thought for most people. We much prefer the illusion that we have some control.
It is much better, I think, to give up this notion of simple explanations and work towards finding the underlying causes that lie much deeper than our “fix-it-quick” society allows. Investing in finding the root causes of mental illness is something we’ve waited far too long to do. If we want to learn something from Columbine and the other, much smaller, tragedies that occur on a daily basis, let it be that maybe our health care system is missing chances to help people in complicated situations by prescribing simple solutions (i.e., a bottle of pills).
Like Susan, I don’t have the answer. I wish, after 20 years, that I did. I’d like to say that I appreciate Susan Klebold’s courage in publishing part of her story. I believe she speaks the truth, and I empathize with her pain, as well as the pain of all of those who suffered from the actions of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. There are no simple lessons that we can take from these events, but by sharing her story, Susan has done what we all should to help others in similar situations. Silence is the enemy. Talk about it. You are not alone.
A few weeks ago, I heard about an interview with Susan Klebold in the November 2009 issue of O Magazine. If you read my earlier post on this subject, you’ll know that I had an opinion on this article before I read it. I pointed out that Dylan Klebold is the one who killed the people at Columbine as well as himself. Susan Klebold is not a murderer. She is, however, the family member of someone who had a mental illness. Because it is clear to me that her son was mentally ill. I think we can safely assume that anyone who commits such terrible acts is mentally ill. Depressed for sure, and perhaps other illnesses as well.
I was initially apalled by some of the reactions to this interview. People commenting on the initial AP story showed no mercy, and oftentimes just downright cruelty. And this was before the article was printed!
I’ve read it for myself now. I initially was under the impression that the article was an interview with Susan Klebold, but she actually wrote it herself. I commend her for the courage to do such a thing, given that the comments I saw probably only scratched the surface of what she’s been through. Indeed, in the first part of this article, she talks about this very subject: “I was widely viewed as a perpetrator or at least an accomplice since I was the person who had raised a ‘monster.'”
This comment struck me as a central issue facing families of the mentally ill. It is, perhaps, elevated by the fact that Susan was Dylan’s mother, and parents are viewed as being responsible for their children’s behavior in our society. It is also central to the guilt so common in families of the mentally ill — we often mistakenly believe that we have some sort of control over our loved one’s thoughts or behavior.
Let me make this point clear. We can influence other people. But no one can CONTROL someone else’s THOUGHTS or BEHAVIOR. Anyone hanging around with a toddler can testify that they wish they could. But it is impossible. We are born with free will.
Yet we often hear the same question after any tragedy associated with the mentally ill: “Why didn’t someone DO something about it?”
Let’s stop for a moment and consider what it must be like to be Susan Klebold. How many times must she have been asked this question? How many times must she have asked herself this question? Really, does anyone think that if she KNEW what her son was going to do, that she WOULD NOT have done everything in her power to stop it? That she wouldn’t have disabled his car, searched his room, called the police or followed him to school that day, hanging on his pants legs?
I think any survivor of suicide would agree that they would have done anything to stop the tragedy IF ONLY THEY HAD KNOWN. But they didn’t. Suicidal people don’t send out memos with their planned time and method. The fact that she didn’t know, that she didn’t see the signs is completely believable to me. The fact that a teenage boy did not share his most desperate internal pain with his parents is also completely believable to me.
Yet Susan Klebold does not let herself off that easily. She admits that “I mistrusted everything — especially my own judgment.” Not to mention, “It was impossible to believe that someone I had raised could cause so much suffering.”
Wow. I understand that. How difficult was it for me to believe that my mother could commit suicide with her two teenage children in the same house. Did she not understand the pain she would be bringing into our lives?
No. She did not. It doesn’t take a Columbine-sized tragedy to feel the pain of loving someone who is mentally ill. Susan Klebold, unfortunately, has to deal with it on a national level, given the media attention focused on the tragedy surrounding her son, his friend and their actions. I see many parallels between her experiences and the families of the 33,000 other Americans who commit suicide every year.
More on this subject to come…
I’m a long-time subscriber to O Magazine. This is a bit out of character for me — my magazine subscriptions are usually limited to Newsweek, Consumer Reports and (thanks to a ton of expiring frequent flier miles) Entertainment Weekly. I’ve never been a faithful Oprah show watcher — I usually work when she’s on TV during the day. But after my old boss handed me a copy of the first issue of O Magazine to “steal some design ideas because you know Oprah can afford to hire the best,” I’ve been hooked.
I know, thanks to a ton of press coverage, that the upcoming issue has an exclusive interview with Susan Klebold, the mother of one of the Columbine students who plotted the killings, then committed suicide. The issue has not hit my mailbox yet, and all I have to share so far is an insufficient preview link on O Magazine’s website.
However, not reading the article hasn’t prevented many people from commenting on its content. I was surprised to read a number of comments on the initial AP press story where people were absolutely ruthless in blaming this woman for her son’s actions. I’m not going to link to them here — they don’t deserve that level of publicity. Google it yourself, if you really need to know.
However, I have one thought to share on this topic, and I’ll save the rest until I read the article for myself. First, Susan Klebold did not kill anyone. Her son did. Her son was clearly mentally ill. And as much as people would like to believe otherwise, no one has control over anyone else. Not even mothers over their own children.
It’s one of the biggest challenges of mental illness, and suicide in particular. People ask: How could so-and-so have let this happen? The answer is they probably didn’t LET it happen. They didn’t have control over what did happen. One person can never fully control another’s thoughts, feelings or actions. That is why suicide is so hard to prevent.
Yet our society does not see things that way. There is a need to assign blame. And the families of the mentally ill person are first in line for the blame game.
I have a lot more to say on this topic after I check my mailbox this week. Stay tuned.
Families of the Mentally Ill 