Sue asked the people in the diversion program whether Dylan needed counseling, and they administered standardized psychological tests and found no indication that he was suicidal, homicidal, or depressed. “If I could say something to a roomful of parents right now, I would say, ‘Never trust what you see,’” Sue said. “Was he nice? Was he thoughtful? I was taking a walk not long before he died, and I’d asked him, ‘Come and pick me up if it rains.’ And he did. He was there for you, and he was the best listener I ever met. I realize now that that was because he didn’t want to talk, and he was hiding. He and Eric worked together at the pizza parlor. A couple of weeks before Columbine, Eric’s beloved dog was sick, and it looked like he wasn’t going to make it, and so Dylan worked Eric’s shift as well as his own so that Eric could have the time with his dog.”

In the writing Dylan and Eric left behind, Eric comes off as homicidal; his anger is all directed outward. Dylan comes off as suicidal; his energy fuels self-abnegation and self-criticism.  self-criticism. It’s as though Dylan went along with the homicide for Eric’s sake, and Eric with the suicide for Dylan’s. Toward the end, Dylan was counting the hours he had left. “How could he keep it so secret,” Sue wondered, “this pain he was in?”

When I asked the Klebolds what they would want to ask Dylan if he were in the room with us, Tom said, “I’d ask him what the hell he was thinking and what the hell he thought he was doing!” Sue looked down at the floor for a minute before saying quietly, “I would ask him to forgive me, for being his mother and never knowing what was going on inside his head, for not being able to help him, for not being the person that he could confide in.” Later she said, “I’ve had thousands of dreams about Dylan where I’m talking to him and trying to get him to tell me how he feels. I dreamed that I was getting him ready for bed, and I lifted up his shirt, and he was covered with cuts. And he was in all this pain, and I didn’t see it; it was hidden.”

The Klebolds were caught in lawsuits brought by some victims’ families. Four years after the tragedy, they were deposed— supposedly confidentially— in front of these parents. The next day, the Denver paper contended that the world had a right to know what they had said. “It was implying, after all that we’d been through, that they still believed we were at fault,” Sue said. “It was, ‘How could you not know? How could you not know?’ And it’s like, ‘I can’t answer that. I didn’t know, I didn’t know, I didn’t know. How many times can you say that? Why would we have known and not gotten help, not told anyone?”

In the wake of so many enormous stresses, Sue was diagnosed with breast cancer. “I don’t believe in chakras,” she said. “But you think about all this heart pain, and failed nurturing, and losing a child. I finally had an opportunity to meet some women who had lost children to suicide. There were six women, and three of us have had breast cancer. I used to laugh and say it was my version of comic relief. Because after all we’d been through, the breast cancer seemed like sort of a nice, normal thing.” For two years after the maelstrom of Columbine, she thought that she wanted to die, but now she was jarred into a new sense of purpose. “It was like, ‘Wait a minute! I have something I have to do first. I have to explain who Dylan was and what he was like.’ I met a woman recently who had lost one son to suicide and whose other son was in jail, and I said to her, ‘You can’t appreciate or believe this now, but if you plunge deep into this, it will lead you to enlightenment. It’s not the path you would have chosen, but it will make you a better and stronger person.’”

After Columbine, Sue had a client who was blind, had only one hand, had just lost her job, and was facing trouble at home. “She said, ‘I may have my problems, but I wouldn’t trade places with you for anything in the world.’ I laughed. All those years I have worked with people with disabilities and thought, ‘Thank God I can see; thank God I can walk; thank God I can scratch my head and feed myself.’ And I’m thinking how funny it is how we all use one another to feel better.”

Sue spoke of herself as a lucky person. “I was fortunate that Dylan did not turn on us. The worst thing he did to us was he took himself away from us. After Columbine, I felt that Dylan killed God. No god could have had anything to do with this, so there must not be one. When everything in your world is gone, all your belief systems, and your self-concepts— your beliefs in yourself, your child, your family— there is a process of trying to establish, who am I? Is there a person there, at all? A woman at work asked me recently how my weekend was, and it happened to be the anniversary of the shootings. So I said that I wasn’t doing so well and I told her why, and she said, ‘I always forget that about you.’ I gave her a hug and said, ‘That’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me in years.’” But Sue does not forget. “I sat next to someone on a train a while ago and we had a really wonderful conversation, and then I could feel the questions coming—‘ So, how many kids do you have?’ I had to forestall it. I had to tell him who I was. And who I am forever now is Dylan’s mother.”

When I mentioned to the Klebolds that I thought they spoke with an extraordinary clarity about their situation, in contrast to some of the other people I had interviewed for this chapter, Tom said, “We are able to be open and honest about those things because our son is dead. His story is complete. We can’t hope for him to do something else, something better. You can tell a story a whole lot better when you know its ending.” A few years after we first met, Sue said to me, “Way back when, we almost got a house in California, and our offer was turned down, and this house in Littleton came up, we made a low offer, and we were so thrilled when it was accepted. At the time we said how lucky we were that the house in California hadn’t worked out. But if it had, Columbine wouldn’t have happened. When it first happened, I used to wish that I had never had children, that I had never married. If Tom and I hadn’t crossed paths at Ohio State, Dylan wouldn’t have existed and this terrible thing wouldn’t have happened. But over time, I’ve come to feel that, for myself, I am glad I had kids and glad I had the kids I did, because the love for them— even at the price of this pain— has been the single greatest joy of my life. When I say that, I am speaking of my own pain, and not of the pain of other people. But I accept my own pain; life is full of suffering, and this is mine. I know it would have been better for the world if Dylan had never been born. But I believe it would not have been better for me.

End.

Excerpt – Solomon, Andrew (2012-11-13)
Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity

Before I went to meet Tom and Sue the first time, a friend asked me whether I was afraid of the Klebolds, as if I might succumb to some contagious evil in their house. Ultimately, what proved difficult to reckon with was their underlying normality. One of Dylan’s friends said that he used to call them Ward and June, after the sunny couple on Leave It to Beaver, because their household seemed so pleasant and predictable. They showed me family photo albums and home videos. I was particularly struck by a video of Dylan on his way to his prom, three days before the massacre. He’s a little churlish in the mode of adolescents, but also has a sweetness about him; he seems like a nice kid. It would never have occurred to me that he could be on the verge of wanton destruction. His long hair pulled back in a neat ponytail, he’s adjusting his rented tuxedo and complaining that the arms are a little short, smiling while his date puts on his boutonniere. “Dad, why are you filming this?” he asks. Then he laughs and says, “Well, someday I’ll watch it again, and I’ll wonder what I was thinking.” It was impressive dissembling, because he imparts the feeling of someone who will one day remember being dressed up, with a pretty girl, on the way to the biggest party of his life. Near the end of the video, he says, “I’ll never have kids. Kids just mess up your life.” The sudden angry moment comes out of nowhere and evaporates just as fast.

From the day of the bloodbath, April 20, until the following October, the Klebolds knew few details about what had transpired, except that Dylan was at the shooting and supposedly committed suicide. “We kept clinging to the belief that he hadn’t really killed anybody,” Sue said. Then came the police report. “It just launched my grief all over again, because I didn’t have denial anymore. They could talk about which people he’d killed. Here’s the little map of the school, with all the little bodies on it.” Then they saw the “basement tapes,” which Dylan and Eric had deliberately left behind, which reveal a Dylan unrelated to the young man in the prom video, someone spewing hatred, full of self-aggrandizing rage. “Seeing those videos was as traumatic as the original event,” Sue said. “All the protective beliefs that we’d held on to were shattered. There wasn’t hate talk in our house. I’m part Jewish, and yet the anti-Semitic stuff was there; they were going through every derogatory word: a nigger; a kike. I saw the end product of my life’s work: I had created a monster. Everything I had refused to believe was true. Dylan was a willing participant, and the massacre was not a spontaneous impulse. He had purchased and created weapons that were designed to end the lives of as many people as possible. He shot to kill. For the first time, I understood how Dylan appeared to others. When I saw his disdain for the world, I almost hated my son. I wanted to destroy the video that preserved him in that twisted and fierce mistake. From then on, no matter how lovingly he would be remembered by those who knew him, the tapes would provide a lasting contradiction to anything positive that could be said about his character. For me, it’s a smothering emptiness.” On these tapes, like the hope at the bottom of Pandora’s box, is one moment of kindness: when Eric mentions their parents, Dylan says, “My parents have been good to me. I don’t want to browse there.”

If you take Tom and Sue back to their prelapsarian memories, ease creeps into their voices. “Dylan was a marvel,” Tom recalled of his son’s early childhood. “Completely self-motivated. Curious.” Every year on Dylan’s birthday, Tom goes up to the place where the two used to hike and takes a Dr Pepper, because Dylan loved Dr. Pepper, and the stuffed koala that was Dylan’s childhood favorite. The Klebolds needed three years to clean out Dylan’s room and to remake it into the pleasant guest room in which I slept on my visits. Sue said, “He was a wonderful, marvelous, pretty-close-to-perfect child. He made you feel like a great parent, because he did everything right. Dylan had this incredible sense of organization, and structure, and all this executive functioning.” At three, he could already count to 110 and would use refrigerator magnets to make equations. He entered preschool a year early, earned top grades, and was accepted to the gifted-children program. “When he was very young, he would dump five or six puzzles into a pile, so he would have the thrill of working on them all at the same time. He liked mazes; he liked word searches. He played chess with Tom. He was just a delight.” Sue looked at me sideways, then said quietly, “You can’t imagine how long it’s been since I had a chance to brag about my son.” Later she said, “He was very malleable; you’d reason with him and say, ‘This is why I think you should do something,’ and you could almost always persuade him to change his mind. Which I used to see as a strength, from the perspective of a parent. But I see now that it might have been a terrible detriment.”

Only one incident with Dylan, the year before the massacre, suggested something might be amiss. The spring of his junior year, Dylan had asked to spend the night at his friend Zack’s place, and when Zack had to cancel, Dylan took advantage and went driving with Eric. On their way to set off fireworks on a canyon road, they stopped at a parking lot and noticed a van with video equipment in the front seat. They grabbed a rock, broke the window, stole the equipment, then turned on their interior lights to inspect their haul. When a policeman stopped to see what was going on, Dylan confessed to the theft almost immediately, and both boys were taken to be booked. “The phone rings,” Sue said. “It was the sheriff’s department— the darkest night of our lives to that point.” They went down to the station to find Dylan and Eric in handcuffs. The police released the boys back to their parents’ custody and put them in a diversion program, which aims to help juveniles avoid a criminal record by assigning them community service, educational directives, and restitution. With hindsight, Sue believes that this putative act of mercy was a mean trick of fate; had they gone to jail, the boys would have been separated and out of the school where they felt debased.

The family didn’t get home until dawn, and Sue was so angry she couldn’t speak to Dylan. When Tom went for a walk the next day with Dylan, he was startled by his son’s fury about the arrest. “He felt so above it all, totally justified in what he’d done,” Tom said. “The morality of the whole thing escaped him.” Sue noticed a similar attitude, and the diversion record remarks that he didn’t connect to the wrongness of what he did. “I said, ‘Dylan, help me understand this,’” Sue said. “‘ How could you do something so morally wrong?’ And he said, ‘Well, I didn’t do it to another human being; it was to a company. That’s what they have insurance for.’ And I said, ‘Dylan! You’re scaring me!’ He said, ‘Well, it scared me, too, because I don’t know why I did it. Just, suddenly, we’d done it.’ His mother chalked it up to teenage impulse and made him promise that he would never do anything of the sort again. “He said, ‘I promise. But I’m scared, because I didn’t know I was going to do it this time.’ So I said, ‘Well, now you know.’” 

Excerpt – Solomon, Andrew (2012-11-13)
Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity