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New York, 10:13 PM
Sun Nov 22
20 posts in the last 24 hours
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10/23/09
When I was a girl a drunk driver was racing with another drunk driver and killed my father and brother. I was also in the car and to this day suffer from the affects of my injuries. That was more than fifteen years ago. This man was not prosecuted for drunk driving because he was caught several days after the accident. This was always a problem for members of my family. It never bothered me, this somehow defective justice. My family was gone. If they had drawn and quartered him, I would have felt worse.
The drunk driver was someone's alcoholic son, someone's alcoholic lover, perhaps someone's alcoholic dad. I would never begrudge them their own sadness and shame. They lost someone, long before he took the lives of my dad and brother. Shame and sadness know no bounds or ridged qualifications as to who can feel them. Acknowledging that she lost someone too does not take away from the "real" victims. Nothing can. #columbine
10/22/09
10/22/09
10/22/09
10/23/09
10/22/09
The stigma and shame that sociey still heaps on such deaths is awful. My brother had a brain illness, and that illness is just as real as a cancer of any other major organ. He fought it and it was lethal. It's no one's fault, least of which his own. (Well, if I blame anyone, it is people and health insurers who discriminate against people with mental illness, who make it do much more deadly by making it more difficult for people to be treated.)
I can't image the depth of pain this woman is feeling, facing the world's wrath on top of her grief. I don't begrudge her any attempt to try to help others or heal herself. #columbine
10/22/09
10/22/09
I just wonder if there is a little of this involved. #columbine
10/22/09
We are a society that likes to categorize people and things and put them into neat little boxes with shiny labels. Susan Klebold doesn't fit into a box, even though the media and probably even Susan herself desperately want to put her in one.
This woman is dealing with her grief the best way she can, please, just give her a break. If focusing on her son as a suicide victim instead of a murderer helps her sleep at night, then I say go for it.
This criticism is probably the reason that she has never spoken out before. #columbine
10/22/09
10/22/09
10/22/09
What he had done was crawl into our treehouse with a shotgun, put the shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. We found him 2 days later.
My mother, in her blistering grief, decided to have an open casket- the reconstructive work that I had to view on my own brother haunts me almost every day.
He left no note, no legacy. He was 20. His last moments were not captured and overanalyzed on video. We had no warning, no clue that could have helped us pull him back from the edge. I can only imagine, as I have many hundreds of thousands of times, how desperately sad he was, crawling into his treehouse with those thoughts.
Susan Klebold should be ashamed of herself. Her son's actions were those of a coward- yes, some would say suicide is a cowardly act- but Dylan Klebold blew his brains out because he didn't want to live with the aftermath of what he did, and the punishment that would have followed.
Yes, Susan, come out and tell us that you're sad and suffering, even sell magazines in the process. That's valid, your story is compelling. But do me a favor and don't act like you and my mother have even one thing in common other than the fact that both of your sons had inappropriate access to weapons. #columbine
10/22/09
10/22/09
10/22/09
No one is denying that Harris and Klebold were mass murderers. But not all mass murders kill themselves in the process.
Would it be OK to call it suicide only if they had killed themselves hours, days, weeks, or years later, in jail? Is it because we assume they killed themselves to avoid jail time, not because they no longer wished to live? Is killing oneself for 'practical' or ideological reasons not suicide? (I do not present this question cynically- I think there are some legitimate reasoning behind what should be considered a suicide, if we establish that the word has become too all-encompassing.)
But Mrs. Klebold is working with the vocabulary that she is and I don't think it's fair to wrong her for it. If the vernacular has not yet changed with society, that's not her fault.
Should we expect Dylan's mother to feel nothing about the fact that he turned his gun on himself because he turned it on others, first?
She lost her son. He killed himself. The word we use for that is 'suicide', even if it was a part of another unthinkable crime. She's allowed to grieve for her son, and in public, and call it what she was taught it is called all her life.
As it stands right now, mass murder and suicide are not mutually exclusive. #columbine
10/22/09
10/22/09
On the one hand, I DON'T begrudge Susan Klebold her story. I can empathize with the mental and emotional gymnastics one has to perform in order to finally find peace with herself and what happened.
On the other hand, suicide IS different from murder. With the stigma that has already been attached to the former, I truly don't want her speaking for all survivors. In fact, one of the comforts my family found was the fact that she DIDN'T blow up and hurt someone else. She self-imploded, which is completely different (Yes, we have to play our emotional gymnastics too). #columbine
10/22/09
Suicide is complicated, tragic and deeply personal, but is also a major public health concern - 1 000 000 die worldwide each year, and it's the second leading cause of death for people under age 25 (motor vehicle accidents are first). I'm not sure how we are doing suicide prevention any favors by casting moral judgment on those who end their lives this way - I would hate to divide suicide victims into "good" and "bad", or families as "deserving" or "undeserving" of empathy.
To me, it's not about whether Dylan Klebold was good or bad, he ended his life in a poorly understood, extremely traumatic way. I know he murdered 13 other people; I can't imagine how hard it is for those families. But at the end of the day, he cause of death is a major public health crisis that is underfunded, under-understood, and stigmatized. Casting judgment about whether he "deserves" to be seen a face of a complicated mental health cause of death seems counterintuitive to me. He is. His family deserves to mourn. #columbine
10/22/09
Regardless, any time we can shine a light on psychiatric illness it's an overall good thing. Not that we can prevent suicide - because as a psychiatrist friend has noted, many times the first outward sign of depression is an attempted, or completed suicide - but so that we can understand and normalize it enough that hopefully, people who are feeling depressed will seek help before the depression eats them alive. #columbine
10/22/09
10/22/09
I've heard it said that "depression is anger turned inwards", I'm not sure if that's always true, but I think in this instance, it was. Some suicidal people undoubtedly lash out. To save the people they may hurt, we have to save them, too. And who better to speak about that than Susan Klebold?
10/22/09
I should also say that I suffer from chronic major depression, and I would never hurt anyone or myself, but I understand how crazy and unreasonable depression can be. Mental illness is not anyone's fault, and can't always be spotted from the outside, but I see nothing wrong with raising awareness. My own awareness of this disease were what made me get help before it was too late. #columbine