Sue Klebold
Here is the full transcript of Sue Klebold’s Talk on My Son was a Columbine Shooter. This is my Story at TED conference.
Sue Klebold – School counselor
The last time I heard my son’s voice was when he walked out the front door on his way to school. He called out one word in the darkness: “Bye”.
It was April 20, 1999. Later that morning, at Columbine High School, my son Dylan and his friend Eric killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded more than 20 others before taking their own lives. Thirteen innocent people were killed, leaving their loved ones in a state of grief and trauma. Others sustained injuries, some resulting in disfigurement and permanent disability. But the enormity of the tragedy can’t be measured only by the number of deaths and injuries that took place.
There’s no way to quantify the psychological damage of those who were in the school, or who took part in rescue or cleanup efforts. There’s no way to assess the magnitude of a tragedy like Columbine, especially when it can be a blueprint for other shooters who go on to commit atrocities of their own.
Columbine was a tidal wave, and when the crash ended, it would take years for the community and for society to comprehend its impact. It has taken me years to try to accept my son’s legacy. The cruel behavior that defined the end of his life showed me that he was a completely different person from the one I knew.
Afterwards people asked, “How could you not know? What kind of a mother were you?” I still ask myself those same questions.
Before the shootings, I thought of myself as a good mom. Helping my children become caring, healthy, responsible adults was the most important role of my life. But the tragedy convinced me that I failed as a parent, and it’s partially this sense of failure that brings me here today. Aside from his father, I was the one person who knew and loved Dylan the most.
If anyone could have known what was happening, it should have been me, right? But I didn’t know. Today, I’m here to share the experience of what it’s like to be the mother of someone who kills and hurts.
For years after the tragedy, I combed through memories, trying to figure out exactly where I failed as a parent. But there are no simple answers. I can’t give you any solutions. All I can do is share what I have learned.
When I talk to people who didn’t know me before the shootings, I have three challenges to meet. First, when I walk into a room like this, I never know if someone there has experienced loss because of what my son did. I feel a need to acknowledge the suffering caused by a member of my family who isn’t here to do it for himself. So first, with all of my heart, I’m sorry if my son has caused you pain.
The second challenge I have is that I must ask for understanding and even compassion when I talk about my son’s death as a suicide. Two years before he died, he wrote on a piece of paper in a notebook that he was cutting himself. He said that he was in agony and wanted to get a gun so he could end his life. I didn’t know about any of this until months after his death.
When I talk about his death as a suicide, I’m not trying to downplay the viciousness he showed at the end of his life. I’m trying to understand how his suicidal thinking led to murder. After a lot of reading and talking with experts, I have come to believe that his involvement in the shootings was rooted not in his desire to kill but in his desire to die.
The third challenge I have when I talk about my son’s murder-suicide is that I’m talking about mental health — excuse me — is that I’m talking about mental health, or brain health, as I prefer to call it, because it’s more concrete. And in the same breath, I’m talking about violence.
The last thing I want to do is to contribute to the misunderstanding that already exists around mental illness. Only a very small percent of those who have a mental illness are violent toward other people, but of those who die by suicide, it’s estimated that about 75 to maybe more than 90 percent have a diagnosable mental health condition of some kind.
As you all know very well, our mental health care system is not equipped to help everyone, and not everyone with destructive thoughts fits the criteria for a specific diagnosis. Many who have ongoing feelings of fear or anger or hopelessness are never assessed or treated. Too often, they get our attention only if they reach a behavioral crisis. If estimates are correct that about one to two percent of all suicides involves the murder of another person, when suicide rates rise, as they are rising for some populations, the murder-suicide rates will rise as well.
I wanted to understand what was going on in Dylan’s mind prior to his death, so I looked for answers from other survivors of suicide loss. I did research and volunteered to help with fund-raising events, and whenever I could, I talked with those who had survived their own suicidal crisis or attempt. One of the most helpful conversations I had was with a coworker who overheard me talking to someone else in my office cubicle. She heard me say that Dylan could not have loved me if he could do something as horrible as he did. Later, when she found me alone, she apologized for overhearing that conversation, but told me that I was wrong.
She said that when she was a young, single mother with three small children, she became severely depressed and was hospitalized to keep her safe. At the time, she was certain that her children would be better off if she died, so she had made a plan to end her life. She assured me that a mother’s love was the strongest bond on Earth, and that she loved her children more than anything in the world, but because of her illness, she was sure that they would be better off without her.
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