A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy(87)

I have always loved trees. I’m inspired by their fortitude and character—their knots and scars and burls, the sites of so many injuries and so much life—and by their generosity, the way they uncomplainingly provide shade and oxygen and food and shelter and fuel. Trees are both deeply grounded and aspirational; they never stop reaching. They feel like friends, and the idea of drawing them became a safe and comforting place for me to park my mind. But I could not yet put pencil to paper.

Indeed, I would not achieve the integration I sought until I found two nutrients essential to so many survivors. First, I found community and then I found a way to contribute.

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Met C. Her son D. killed himself at 12 after a bad day at school. It was over a year and a half ago and she still cries all the time. I cried hard all the way home and realized how much I want to be in a support group. Will lock cats out tonight so I can sleep.

—Journal entry, July 1999



Less than three months after the shootings, my supervisor sent me to a large regional conference for rehabilitation professionals. I debated about whether to go; while I had come to feel a little more comfortable with my coworkers, I wasn’t sure I was ready to be out in the wider world. Ultimately I asked the organizers to hold my nametag behind the registration table until I asked them for it. By then, such precautions had become a way of life.

When I went to claim my badge, one of the two women behind the table looked up. “Sue Klebold?” she asked. I tensed, as I would for years. But the lovely dark-haired woman reached across the table for my hand. “I’m Celia. I want you to know many people understand what you’re going through right now.” Her voice was warm, but she did not smile. When she continued, I understood why. “My twelve-year-old son died by suicide last year,” she said.

I had received an enormous amount of sympathy, and many letters of commiseration. Our friends and my colleagues had been wonderful but I always felt the distance between their experiences and my own. Celia’s hand on mine, and those words—“many people understand what you’re going through”—tethered me back to the world, providing a deep and automatic consolation, the way a distraught toddler’s tears stop as soon as he’s swept up into his mother’s arms. I asked Celia if she might have some time to sit and talk, and she told me she’d be relieved from the registration desk in half an hour.

The next thirty minutes were wasted. I cried in the bathroom for half of it, and walked around in a daze for the rest. My need to talk to another mother who had lost a child to suicide was even greater than I had known. When Celia reached out, I grabbed hold of what she was offering like I was grabbing for a rope, mid-fall.

We spent almost an hour in two plush chairs in the hotel lobby, holding hands and sharing. I was careful not to divulge specifics about Dylan that might put Celia in legal jeopardy. Meanwhile, her own story broke my heart. She’d lost her son so young! At least I had been able to see Dylan as a young man.

I knew I wasn’t the only mother who’d had absolutely no idea how troubled her beloved child had been, but I’d had few opportunities to feel the kinship that comes from talking to someone who has also lost someone to suicide. It helped that Celia was so pretty and well put-together, so intelligent and articulate—the kind of woman I would have admired under any circumstances. Her sophisticated normality was a balm, as I had unwittingly bought into many of the ignorant myths about suicide.

As we tearfully hugged good-bye, I felt closer to her than I felt to anyone in the world. “I can’t imagine what you’re going through,” people would say, shaking their heads—and they were right. I say that without judgment. Who could imagine going through something like this? I certainly could not have. Surrounded as I was by love and support, I felt completely adrift from normal experience—and indeed, from myself. It was, I came to realize, how Dylan must have felt at the end of his life.

There had been no relief for me on the horizon, no indication it would ever feel any different, until Celia put her hand on mine. With one gesture, she had connected me to a society of survivors who would welcome me without hatred or judgment. For the first time, I felt a gleam of hope that I might not have to spend the rest of my life spinning on my own solitary planet, grappling with feelings no one else could understand.

Somewhere out there, there was a tribe of people who would see me as a sister, a partner, a soul mate—who would allow me to join them in making a contribution.

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In the second year after Dylan’s death, I finally found that community.

It had been painful to feel so profoundly alienated from the place where we had made our home. I had always chatted easily with the barista at Starbucks, and I knew the names of all the women at the supermarket checkout. After Columbine, I anxiously watched people’s body language and facial micro-expressions to see whether they recognized me. Luckily, 99.9 percent of the people who did had something kind to say, but cringing like a frightened animal in the place where we’d made our home had shaken my sense of myself.

Much has been written about what happened in Littleton in the wake of the tragedy. As humans go into shock after an assault on their bodies, so do communities. As President Clinton said on the night of the massacre, “If it could happen in a place like Littleton…” This wasn’t the drug-riddled inner city, or some supposedly godless corridor like New York or Los Angeles. People who lived in Littleton were upstanding citizens with nice suburban houses and happy, healthy, well-fed children. We expected our schools to be safe.