A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of the Columbine Tragedy - Sue Klebold

I've been putting of writing this review. Reading A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of the Columbine Tragedy left me feeling pretty raw. 

In April 1999, I was well ensconced at my freshman year at college. I had graduated from an all-girls Catholic High School in Cincinnati. The fact that I had once been to Colorado to visit the US Air Force Academy is about as familiar as I was with Columbine, in that I knew it was also in Colorado. Like basically anyone else at the time (which seems quaint now, by the way), this kind of act seemed beyond imagination to me. How could something like this possibly happen? I have never been the kind of person hungry for macabre details. Honoring victims by hearing their names and reading their stories yet, but I don't want to know the details of their last moments. And I'm extremely uninterested in providing the perpetrators of such acts with a platform to spew their demented hatred.

But then this. This book. Which does nothing of the above except to lay open bare the fallout such an action has on the family left behind. I, like probably a lot of people at the time, gave barely any thought to the Klebold's except to assume they did something terribly wrong to raise and not recognize such a predator in their midst. But with age comes something like wisdom (if by wisdom, I mean that I actually realize I'm not quite as smart as I thought I was, and I get a lot of things wrong). 

So here I was, willing to accept that Sue Klebold may have something vital to say. And willing to listen because as the mother of a six year old boy, who will someday be a teenager, who will one day go to High School, who will hopefully someday leave that high school without having to fear for his life, or consider taking his own, or someone else's - I may learn something important.

And I did. Learn something important. Maybe not specifically about me per se, but about the depths of deception people go to hide pain and anger. About how the children you have are known and utterly unknown to you at the same time. I should have known this. A lesson from my own teenage years, about what I shared and what I hid. Something not unlike the carefully cultivated social media identities we all create. Glennon Doyle said in Love Warrior that she spent a lot of time sending out her "representative" to interact with the world, protecting her true self. My own representative got me through high school. Sometimes still gets me through awkward parent events. 

Dylan Klebold sent his representative out into the world, allowing only a journal and perhaps Eric Harris to know the depths of his despair. Certainly his parents were never aware. Only now, Sue Klebold realizes there were definite signs she missed - things she passed over as typical teenage mood swings. She reassured herself that everything was fine. And inside her boy, the child they referred to as their "Sunshine Boy" was dying. And in his place, a callous unfeeling person took root. A person who wanted to die, who cared so little about living, the manner of his death (who he took with him) meant nothing. 

That a mother would still grieve her child, even after such a hideous act, seems obvious. I am constantly telling my children that I love them no matter what. No matter how they act or what they do, to reassure them when they've lost control of themselves that my love can be an anchor to hold them in place or bring them back, help them fight against the currents. But it's not enough. Sue Klebold has told me it's not enough. Because she knows. And the price she paid (and many children paid) for that knowledge is unthinkable.

4/5 Stars. 

A Scanner Darkly - Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick was ahead of his time when he penned A Scanner Darkly. Published in 1977, it is a gritty dystopian story of undercover narcotics informant Bob Arctor who lives in a house with other substance abusers. The world is divided between dopers and straights and never the two intermix. The straights have been taught that the dopers are mindless fiends for the drugs - substance D.

When Arctor puts on a "scramble suit" causing him to appear as a faceless nameless blur, he takes on the persona of Fred, a narcotics agent charged, ironically with the surveillance of Bob Arctor, who seems to be making a play to become a heavy drug dealer. Because Arctor must consumer substance D in order to maintain his cover, the damage done to his brain causes him to suffer a rift in his reality, where eventually he no longer recognizes that Fred and Bob Arctor are one in the same. It's brilliantly painful, and slowly wrought as Dick's writing makes smaller and smaller moves to make us aware of the breakdown. 

At once a condemnation of the damage done by drugs, without condemnation of the users, Dick's story came from a deeply personal place, evident by the epilogue in which he lists the names of several people who died or became disabled due to their drug use. The novel also serves as an early condemnation of the war on drugs, which criminalized small dealers, but created an industry that required the addicts in order to operate. 

I can only imagine this was difficult to write. There were times when the story moved frustratingly slow, but mostly it was a pleasure to read. 

4/5 Stars.