On the morning of April 20, 1999, Sue Klebold got up and went to work like any other day. By lunchtime, she received an unsettling frantic phone call from her husband that something happened at her son's school. By afternoon, she was kicked out onto her driveway while swarms of police pulled apart her house, not giving her any information. By evening, neighbours were blocking off swarms of media while the Klebolds bolted into the night trying to find a safe place to stay.
Sue Klebold learned her son was dead. Not only that, she learned he was one of the killers during the Columbine massacre. Her living nightmare had just begun.
A few months ago, I read Columbine by Dave Cullen, a thoroughly researched journalist's account of what happened when teenagers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold secretly planned and then executed a mass shooting at their high school. A Mother's Reckoning shares the personal side about how that terrible tragedy impacted Dylan's family who was left behind, specifically his mother, Sue.
How do you get through each day when your world has been turned upside down? How do you grieve your son's death by suicide while simultaneously coming to terms that he was also a sadistic murderer? How do you cope with everyday life when you are suddenly blamed for your son's actions, your surname is now equated to mass murder and you are facing what your lawyer warned you would be "a firestorm of hatred"? What do you do when you need to process your feelings but can't join a support group because the other members could be subpoenaed for information? How can you possibly comfort/apologize to/provide reassurance to parents of children who have been murdered by your own child? How do you return to work when your head is spinning and you can't stop crying? Who can you talk to when absolutely no one can truly relate to the exact situation you're going through? How do you respond to media speculation when everything you, your friends, or family members respond to gets twisted and misrepresented? How do you reconcile memories of what you thought was your normal, loving child with the reality that your child has hidden the most evil, nightmarish secret plans from you? How do you grieve a child you loved with all of your heart, whose monstrous actions you hate, while discovering he wasn't at all the person you thought he was? How do you attempt to convince everyone around you that you honestly, truly had zero idea of your son's intentions? That he simply wasn't the person you raised or knew?
How do you go on?
This is the story that attempts to answer all of these impossible questions. It's about a mother who is left to sift through the wreckage that her life has become as she tries to make sense of the living hell she's been put through. She used to just be a regular mom; in the aftermath, she's broken, terrified, suicidal, a detective of her own life trying to figure out where it all went wrong. It's just as heartbreaking as it sounds, but I can't tell you how much respect I have for this woman who woke up one day as a normal, everyday loving mother and in the blink of an eye found herself thrust into the worst nightmare one could imagine.
Yet somehow she found a way to go on.
Judge the cover: 3/5
Judge the cover: 3/5
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