The killers’ bodies are taken from the school. There’s nothing left now but aftermath. The snow begins to fall as they’re hauled away. Big, locust flakes, blown by an east wind, banishing the earth, unbelievable except for the fact that they’re real and cling to everyone—the camera crews jockeying for tears, the governor’s entourage, which has just arrived to inspect the decimated building, and the kids, wearing tranquilized masks, who gather to mourn at makeshift memorials, held up by one another, their hair covered in veils of white.
On the night of the massacre, the minister, Don Marxhausen, calls an impromptu service at his church. “The body of Christ,” he murmurs again and again, and near the end of Communion a female parishioner approaches, answering not with “Amen” but “Klebold.”
“The body of Christ,” he says again, confused, but again the answer: “Klebold.”
“Don’t forget them in their hour of need,” she says.
Shortly after, Reverend Don gets a phone call from Tom Klebold, the father of Dylan. “I need your help,” he says, “but it has to be confidential.”
Reverend Don doesn’t shy from complicated spiritual transactions. He goes where he’s most needed, reaches out to those who most need lifting. He carries his 240 pounds as if he could still do a little damage in hell if he had to. Among the conservative evangelicals who dominate this place, he’s a liberal misfit. If you can’t laugh, even in the worst times, he says, if you can’t find some smiling note in the dirge—or, at least, forgiveness—then you may as well forget about salvation. So he agrees to do the memorial service for Dylan Klebold because the boy is a misfit, too, and still one of God’s children.
When he arrives for the service, Sue Klebold, the mother, embraces him. He can feel her trembling, and she leads him to an open casket in which her son Dylan—the killer formerly known as V—has been laid to rest. The image of him sleeping here, coiffed for good-bye, is startling: He’s surrounded by Beanie Babies, a ring of them that runs from one ear to the other.
How does one commend this sweet boy, a mass murderer, to heaven? Reverend Don doesn’t even try. “Do you mind if we just talk for a while,” he says, “and then we’ll worship.” And so they do. One couple says that the Klebolds are great parents. And another couple agrees and chimes in, “He was like our son!”
Then Tom Klebold speaks: We don’t believe in guns. We’ve never had any in our house.
And Sue: I don’t understand the anti-Semitism. I’m his mother, and I’m Jewish.
It goes like this for forty-five minutes—this confusion and disbelief suffusing everything, though they really try to remember him for the funny, sensitive kid he was. Only Dylan’s older brother remains silent. Nothing negative is said, though the enormity of what has brought them here crushes down on everything. How do you reach these parents who have not only lost a son but whose son set out, it seems, to kill an entire town?
Reverend Don tells a story about how, in the Bible, David, the king of Israel, once had a son named Absalom, a beautiful boy who was a fierce rabble-rouser, inciting civil war against his father. In the end, David’s loyal general, Joab, was forced to kill Absalom in order to restore the kingdom, and yet David, when confronted by his son’s body, was so overcome by grief, he broke down. “Would God I had died for thee,” he wailed, “O Absalom, my son, my son!”
It is the perfect parable about the purity and endlessness of a father’s love, no matter what the situation. And the Klebolds cling to it. After a few blessings, they’re done. Dylan is later cremated—for fear that a grave site would be defiled—and when the minister asks one of the Klebolds’ legal representatives what to do in case the media come calling, Reverend Don is mildly surprised when the man says, “Just tell them what you’ve seen here tonight.”
And so he does. He agrees to two nationally televised interviews. To America, he describes the Klebolds as a family in deep, unimaginable pain. About the service, he says he saw two innocent parents “questioning where their son came from.” He stays in touch with Tom and Sue, visits occasionally. Tom, a former geophysicist, rarely leaves his house. The driveway has two gates on it, and he sits up in his office, cloistered from the world. Sue has a position with a local college, working with the disabled. She pens letters to the victims’ families, expressing her grief. She has so many questions now about her son. She invites a small group over to watch the prom-night video they took of Dylan. He wore a tux and went with a friend, Robyn, a girl who also secretly bought guns for Reb and V. But in the video, they’re merely high school seniors, pinning each other with corsages, giggling embarrassedly, then getting into the limo on one of the biggest nights of their young lives. Sue Klebold scours the television screen for clues. There are no clues.
As for Reverend Don, when he twice defends the killer’s family on national television, when word leaks out that he led Dylan’s memorial service, well, something turns and hooks in his parish, and they begin to hate. There are forty-six families here who had kids inside Columbine High School that day, and suddenly he’s Absalom.
On the first-year anniversary of the massacre, even as the reverend addresses thousands in Clement Park, his church council unanimously votes for his firing. Within three months, he sells his house, packs and is banished from Littleton, Colorado, for good.
[Source for this entire beautifully written 2004 article –Columbine Never Sleeps]
The Everlasting Contrast 