Some Pain is Good

This piece brought tears to my eyes. I always wonder, What if I have kids one day and they turn out to be rapists or murderers? What will I do? Such questions make me not want to have kids. Hearing the mother of a child who committed brutal murder and gory suicide speak about her son is extremely frightening and discomforting. At first, I thought she was going to say that her son had seemed like the perfect child, like he would never do anything so terrible—that’s what it seems like she says on the first page: “Dylan was a gentle, sensible kid…”

After this, however, she goes on to say that he had changed and become more troublesome in the years leading up to the attack. This is not atypical for high schoolers—I myself kept secrets from my parents and lied about what I was doing. I was even suspended from school for shoplifting from WalMart when I was 14. Klebold and his friend, Eric Harris, did similar things, but they were more quiet, more angry, and more distanced from those around them.

And she had no clue that such a thing could happen. Her husband seemed a bit more intuitive—he had a bad feeling that his son had been involved in the killings. Oddly enough, Klebold leaves her husband out of her story after the very first part. Columbine’s story is a devastating one, and I read the book about Cassie Bernall (She Said Yes) when I was about ten, but since then I haven’t thought much about Columbine. I looked up some CBS videos and some of the footage is so scary and sad—Dylan and his friend running through the school, knocking things over, holding giant black guns in their hands--but survivors of the shootings deal very well with the incident: they say they’ve turned their lives into meaningful things and they focus on the positive aspects of Columbine’s shooting (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXKKtFfKSBI&feature=relmfu).

I think that’s part of what Susan tries to do. She doesn’t say that she has any project or awareness methods to help her bring good out of Dylan’s message, but I think it’s still too hard for her: it did take her ten years to write about Dylan and the massacre. I do, however, think she tries to blame others for not noticing the warning signs. For example, she says the English teacher who received Dylan’s disturbing essay did not get back to her about Dylan seeing a guidance counselor. She almost seems to blame this teacher for never telling her. Why didn’t she see the teacher again and insist on Dylan getting help? If I wrote an essay like that, I would want someone to help me—it’d almost be a cry for help.  

Susan Klebold reveals many things in this essay through effective flashbacks and harrowing moments. She begins the story at a very tension-filled part, and then flashes back to Dylan’s childhood and adolescence, and then back to the aftermath of the killings. When I read between the lines, I feel that Klebold is admitting her blindness to her son’s troubled final months. He’d done some bad things with a certain bad friend—why didn’t she and her husband try to keep him away from that boy (Eric Harris)? If Dylan hated his school so much, why didn’t they try to ask him why, and give him the choice of going to another school? I am not a parent, but my parents always tried to get to the root of my anger issues and they punished me when I did imbecilic teenagerish things. They were not oppressive: I appreciate their concern, faith, and persistence in dealing with my younger self.

I do not want to go along with the parents and citizens in America who condemned the Klebolds for raising a murderer. However, something HAD to have gone wrong with his life, though, or else he would not have done such a cruel thing. He was depressed and suicidal, yes, but why did he need to devastate an entire community (and his family) in order to end his own suffering? If Klebold needs to see his act as connected to suicide in order to cope, then that is understandable. But for me, it is not enough. Susan seems obsessed with her attempts at keeping her child safe; I, on the other hand, appreciate my parents’ ability to let me experience pain. Pain is a part of life. If one is protected from pain throughout his childhood and then suddenly meets it in adolescence, handling that pain is difficult and sometimes impossible. Parents nowadays want their children to fulfill their own dreams, to excel in school and sports, and live free from trials and tribulations. I’ve seen it in so many of my own friends! I’ve also seen them go off to college, completely forget their sheltered lives, and do things that endanger themselves. They experience natural, painful consequences of their actions and sink into deep depression. I pray that when I someday am a parent, I work with God and my husband in order to allow my children to learn and grow with a little help from me and a lot of help from life.

No matter what we try to speculate about Columbine, we’ll never know why Dylan and Eric (and all the other murderers, suicide-doers, and perpetrators of evil in the world) did what they did. Maybe we’ll find out when the pain of this world is gone and we live in a place where we are NOT supposed to experience pain. Here on earth, it’s inevitable and expected.

--Laura Strawn Ojeda