A few interesting tidbits I highlighted from this newsletter which was published last year. 

Drs. Scott Poland and Douglas Flemons had the opportunity to interview Sue Klebold, author of A Mother’s Reckoning, via telephone in July, 2017.

Sue Klebold is the mother of Dylan Klebold, one of two high-school students who killed 13 people (and wounded 21 others) at Columbine High School in April, 1999. After shooting the others, the two perpetrators took their own lives, using their guns to die by suicide. Since the tragedy, Sue Klebold been active in the suicide prevention community and has worked tirelessly to educate others about the warning signs and risk factors of suicide. She also promotes mental health treatment to ensure that other families do not have to suffer similar tragedies. She is donating 100% of the profits from her book to research and charitable foundations devoted to treating mental health issues. 

Douglas Flemons [DF]: Good morning, Sue. Thank you so much for doing this.

Sue Klebold: Oh, it’s my pleasure.

Dr. Scott Poland [SP]: And on behalf of both of us, we are very sorry for the loss of your son and all the complications and everything about the entire tragedy.

Thank you! I appreciate that.

DF: I was particularly struck by your metaphor of origami, the way that you use that so effectively, to talk about, really, the process that you went through in trying to make sense of the complexity and the horror of everything. Yes. DF: It seemed like such a perfect way of characterizing what you went through in the writing of this book.

Sue Klebold:  Well, I guess what I was thinking—of course, it was a reference to Dylan himself quite literally because he loved origami and that was something that he was just so into when he was a little boy. It was so fun. But I think also of this process of recovery, or, rather, integration—I think the way we integrate a life experience as difficult as that was is a lot like an origami process. You undergo one step and it changes where you were and another fold occurs and it changes your perspective and your life view. It was very similar to the way an origami object evolves and passes through phases. Sometimes it’s one thing on the way to becoming something else. That’s very much what time allows us to do after a loss, an extreme and a severe loss: We see it differently as time progresses. It’s all part of this integration process. Another way I think of it is like a Rubik’s cube. We twist it and turn it and look at it from all sides until we kind of become what that thing is, and we know it inside and out and it becomes part of us.

DF: You took a foray into understanding Dylan in one way, and then you came back to the flat piece of paper and then folded it all into another shape, another understanding. I was really heartened by the fact that you didn’t avoid going into very, very difficult places. You strode into them.

Sue Klebold: I felt that I had to do that. Of course, you know, each one of us will process our losses differently, according to who we are and what feels right to us. And, I don’t know, for me that was the only choice I had because I love Dylan, and I wanted to know everything about him. I wanted to know what his internal journey was that took him to the place where he ended his life so horribly and hurt and killed so many other people. And I just felt that even if it was difficult, I had to connect with the entire experience. Once you get to that place and the experience is so painful, you can revisit that experience and it becomes, over time, less painful. You’re kind of desensitized to all of the things that hurt so much. And I think that’s what I was doing for myself. It was a process of trying to desensitize to things that were just so painful, I couldn’t live with them.

SP: I would like to thank you for all your service with suicide prevention organizations—the American Association of Suicidology, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and, more locally for you, the Suicide Prevention Coalition of Colorado. As you know, much of suicide prevention is driven by survivors. I lost my father to suicide and Douglas lost three friends growing up.

Sue Klebold:  Oh, I’m sorry. But, yes, I think those are the things that drive us to understand. And the more we understand, I think the more passionate we feel about the cause of suicide prevention, recognizing that suicide is preventable and wanting others to learn this so people don’t lose any more loved ones than we already have. The survivor movement, it’s a wonderful thing. I think it’s driving so much of the good work that’s happened.

DF: You, of course, made a significant step from volunteering to help out to being an outspoken spokesperson. In your book you quote a letter by Tom Mauser, the father of Daniel, one of the victims. And you don’t actually comment on the letter but it sure rings through the following pages as a very critical, a very pointed request for you to be a spokesperson. I was wondering the degree to which that letter became a motivator for you to find your voice.

Sue Klebold: Actually, the letter did not affect me in that way because I was already doing all those things by the time I received the letter. The letter was something I received fairly recently. It was not early on in the process. But what I had done, you know I had sort of laid low. I had not been a public person. I had done all these things, and people knew me in the suicide loss community, but I did not, you know, make that known to anyone else. So in the eyes of the community and all the victims of the tragedy, they had no idea where I was or what I was doing. They—and Mr. Mauser’s letter made this clear—they were certainly, and rightfully so, wondering why I hadn’t done anything. But I had been doing things all along; I just hadn’t made it known.

SP: Sue, you’re such a great example of resilience, but what has been the key for you getting the support that you needed?

Sue Klebold: Well, just like everything, I don’t think there’s one key. I think it’s just a combination of many things. First of all, I’m somewhat extroverted. I like people. I like having people around me. I value tremendously the value and support of friends and family. But I also knew from the beginning that if I was going to survive, I needed expert care. And so probably the one thing that stands out as being the most significant for me was that I worked very hard to find a good therapist—a highly qualified therapist who had a grief specialty. I saw this therapist for years. I went back again and again over time. And I will give her the credit for holding me together through all of this. I won’t give her all the credit because of course family and friends helped tremendously, but I think having, finding someone who really understood what I needed was critical. I tell people who have had complicated losses that when someone you love does something horrible—like hurts other people—the work you have to do is to focus on your love for that person and what your loss is. Otherwise, you can get derailed by thinking about the manner of their death and forget who the human being was. For me, the important recovery work was allowing myself to love Dylan with all of my heart and to connect to that love. That helped me sort everything else out.

DF: You described having to start grief over after seeing “The Basement Tapes” . As you said, “I think I was grieving for somebody I didn’t know.” How many times do you think you went, because you talk about all these identity shifts also that you went through in your process. Do you have a sense of how many times your grieving had to kind of go back to zero? Back to square one?

Sue Klebold: Seeing the Basement Tapes and really learning that Dylan was there because of his—I’m going to use air quotes—“choice” (because to what extent does one have choice when one’s thought processes are deteriorating?—I don’t know). But, I had believed up until that point that Dylan’s involvement was somehow accidental, that it was not something that he had chosen to do. I was still holding the model of him as the innocent victim who somehow got sucked into something. And I had to back up and say, “No, somehow he was there.” He made plans. He thought about this ahead of time. He chose to be there. He had guns. He killed and hurt people. I had to really rethink that whole piece. But, this rebuilding of my understanding of him (back to the origami image again) happened hundreds of times—every time I would hear something that someone had observed at the scene, or something that Dylan had said in a classroom that stuck with them. I was rediscovering who Dylan was again and again and again. And it still happens today, 18 years later, when someone will say, “I wanted you to know that…” this particular incident happened, or “I got a pizza and he helped me on the phone and he said this,” or “I  ran out of gas and he drove and got me a can of gas.” And I think every time I hear something I didn’t know about him before, I have the opportunity to rebuild his wholeness from that and to know some other aspect of him that I didn’t know. And that allows me to reset the image I have, so it’s never static.

SP: You talk a lot about mental illness in the book and obviously you’re very focused on suicide prevention. What do you think are the biggest messages you’re trying to get out there about promoting prevention and mental health?

Sue Klebold:  Well, for one, I believe that Columbine didn’t have to happen, that others didn’t have to die, and that Dylan didn’t have to die. This level of deterioration, this sort of stage-four mental condition, is a progression, and if we are able to stop this progression, we can save people. I try to explain to people what I saw, what I didn’t see, how I responded, and how I might have responded differently—how I might have listened better, how I might have been more mindful. And I encourage people not to make the same mistakes I did. One of my mistakes was that I held a wrong assumption. I always assumed that my son was okay because I loved him, and I believed that my love was protective. I think a lot of people tend to believe that. But when someone’s thoughts are deteriorating, when they are struggling, when they are in pain and suffering, we have to understand the extent to which they are not the person that we knew. They are morphing—they have become someone else. And just because we tell someone we love them and we hug them and we support them, it doesn’t mean that that’s what their inner experience is. I think I believed that because I hugged Dylan and told him I loved him, then he knew I was there for him. Our loved ones’ internal experience may be very different from what we perceive it to be, and somehow we have to open up and allow their internal experience to be shared so that they feel safe enough doing that. We have a responsibility to listen, to share, to not be intimidated by or horrified by what someone’s thoughts are, because sometimes people have horrifying thoughts. Allowing them to express those thoughts might save lives.

DF: In our suicide prevention efforts, we see a lot of family members, but also administrators in school systems and so on, thinking that they’re going to make things better if they basically reassure a suicidal person that there’s no need for them to think about themselves the way they are at the moment, and that they’re basically wrong for doing so. They give the message that the suicidal person should just adopt the parents’ or the administrators’ position and then it will all be fine. They espouse that all the suicidal person has to do is to get through it. But in response to such encouragement, the suicidal person ends up feeling less understood.

SP: I think I’m remembering that when Dylan was released from the diversion counseling that you questioned that and were actually even asking if he didn’t need more treatment.

Sue Klebold: Actually, I asked that question in the beginning when he had gotten into the diversion program because he had never stolen anything before. And, you know, this was so out of character for him, so I didn’t know what to make of that. And now I tell people, if you see a dramatic change in behavior—someone has gotten into trouble either at school or with the law—that’s a risk factor for suicide. It tells you that something may be wrong. I remember asking a neighbor who was an attorney as well as the diversion counselor, “I don’t know what this means. Do you think he needs counseling?” The counselor asked him, “Dylan, do you think you need counseling?” And that’s when he dug in, “No, I don’t. You know, this was an impulsive thing. I don’t need counseling. I’ll prove to you I’m fine.” That’s what he did the last year of his life. He worked very hard to demonstrate to everybody that he was fine. He would say, “I’m fine.” However, what was happening internally was anything but that. It was a devastating struggle for him. He was not fine. But when he was released early from the diversion program, they said that rarely happened. It only happened in cases where kids were doing exceptionally well. So I was top of the world at that point. That was huge. I was thinking, “He is great! He got through this! He is fine after all. He didn’t need any counseling. Everything is wonderful. And he’s going to college. He’s going to go to prom.” I saw all of these things as indicators that he was just fine.

DF: And you didn’t see, of course, that he was riding the coattails of Eric [Harris], who had managed to manipulate the counselor into thinking that everything was fine.

Sue Klebold: No. I had no idea. That would take me years to really understand all that.

DF: In your book, you stress that for teenagers, their peers are much more important than family. You now recognize that Dylan was turning to Eric, not to you and your husband, when he was troubled. And that Eric was supplying him a vital way of feeling better about himself.

Sue Klebold: Right. What’s complicated especially about Dylan’s case is that Eric wasn’t Dylan’s only friend. He had other friends. The kid that I always thought was his best friend—Nate—knew that Dylan had purchased a gun. Dylan showed it to him and then told Nate not to tell Eric that he, Dylan, had done so. This is one of the important things we can do to keep our youth safer—offer peer coaching to help kids understand that if someone shows you that they have a gun or tells you that something bad is going to happen, then you have to take that terrible risk to tell someone—an adult—and to get help. I talked with Nate for years about this. He said that he said to Dylan, “Get rid of the gun. Don’t do this. I’m telling your family.” But he said he had no idea that Dylan would ever use it or that he felt suicidal. He said that Dylan wasn’t talking about suicide. It wasn’t even on Nate’s radar screen that this was a life-and-death situation. He didn’t understand that.

DF: People have criticized you, saying, with incredulity, “How could you not have seen your son’s hatred?” In your book, you suggest that Dylan was doing a very good job of hiding this hatred from you, and you don’t think that you could have seen through his dissembling. However, you realize now that there were subtle signs of depression that, with the proper training, you might have been able to recognize and attend to it.

Sue Klebold: Right. And, you know, I think that’s one of the things I try to emphasize, especially when I speak to school counselors or school nurses. Dylan showed signs of something going on. Fourteen months before his death, he was arrested; he got in trouble at school for scratching a locker; and, in the last weeks of his life, he wrote a dark paper at school. There were just these little sort of blips, and nobody put all of these pieces together. I think we have to be hypervigilant. If we see one thing, we need to pay attention, even if it’s not in the presence of other things, because those other things may exist beyond our field of vision. We have to look beyond what we see and try to put a big picture together. I believe Dylan was experiencing depression. I remember him sitting on a couch at the end of his life and just staring into space. He had that thousand-yard stare. I said, “Dylan, are you okay? What’s…you’re so quiet. Is something the matter?” And he stood up and said, “Oh, I just have a lot to do. I’ve got a lot of homework. I’m going to go to my room and do my homework and go to bed early.” So, what do I do as a mom? I say, “Oh, that’s a great idea!” I look back at that and I wonder, in that moment, what might have I done differently? What would have made it possible for me to say, “What’s going on? You know, I’m not leaving until you tell me. I’m here to listen. I’m not going to judge you.” I have had that conversation in my head a thousand times. Just what might have helped me get a bigger picture that I just wasn’t seeing?

[Source: Office of Suicide and Violence Prevention]  (also includes an interesting few cautionary articles on 13 Reasons Why)