After almost 20 years spent thinking about it, and having immersed herself in the worlds of suicide and murder-suicide prevention, what Klebold concludes is, in its way, more shocking than the idea that she was a bad parent or that Dylan was “evil”. I was never for a moment thinking that he was a danger to himself or to anyone else.”And quite quickly, Klebold says, he appeared to get “back on track”. “I didn’t have any choice. “The gentlest portrayal of us as parents in the media was that we were useless,” she writes in A Mother’s Reckoning is a tough read. And yes, he might’ve been helped, if I had known. “I never had anger towards him, except for the moment when I saw the Basement Tapes at the sheriff’s department, six months after he died.” These were the home videos made by Dylan and Eric before the shooting, in which they cavorted around, viciously slamming everyone they knew, throwing out racist epithets and talking about the killing they intended to do. “My focus has been on suicide prevention because – and I don’t ever want to make it seem that I’m discounting the murders that Dylan did, which were terrible and significant and anguishing – but my thinking is that murder-suicide is one manifestation of suicide. You wouldn’t know, if you saw all of us in a room, what brought us together.”The changes were tiny and almost indistinguishable from the normal fluctuations of adolescence, but Klebold now believes that, if she had known then what she knows now, she might have been able to spot them. They’re afraid that if they bring in a suicide-prevention programme, and that if someone then dies by suicide, it will look as if it has been suggested. All rights reserved. Whenever Byron, the eldest son, came over for dinner, Klebold would send him back to his apartment with a freezer bag full of food.This would sound gilded, except here is Klebold, revisiting every detail in a way that implies it might have been easier on her psychologically if there had been a catastrophe in the household, something pointing to why Dylan did what he did. In the aftermath of the shooting, she effectively lost him twice: first, physically; then as a memory.

This was a year before the massacre, and one of the very rare moments in the book when one questions Klebold’s handling of her son. (Sue’s job, coordinating grants to help disabled people learn computer skills, was satisfying but not terribly well paid. He was short-tempered and withdrawn, and his hair went ungroomed.

I believe Dylan had some kind of a mood disorder. It can happen to someone else, it can’t happen to us. “I felt about a day of anger because he was bad-mouthing everybody and everything – family members – and pulling things out of his past, some incident in day care when he was three years old. When everyone else was seeing the last moments of his life as vicious and evil and sadistic, I was thinking, that’s my poor kid, he was in this horrible situation, he dishonoured himself. Later, she apologised to him. You wouldn’t know what brought us togetherKlebold no longer thinks like this; one of the hardest tasks of the last 17 years has been to accept that Dylan played an equal part in planning and executing the massacre. I’m getting angry, and I don’t know how well I can control it.” The voice he used was soft and “carried warning power”, Klebold says, and she immediately backed off. But she is also asking that a fundamental reassessment take place of what it is that can make teenagers kill. Before the late 1990s, the biggest upset to have shaken the Klebold family was when a small amount of marijuana was found in Byron’s room, a discovery they reacted to in a way that quells any notions they were too liberal as parents.

Nevertheless, when she writes about Harris, she struggles to extend to him the same sympathy she reserves for her son. It’s not her issue, she says. J'suis dans la guérilla, au milieu Du combat dans l'anonymat, j'veux vie heureuse Il n'y a qu'une place sur l’estrade, oublie les dieux Dans ma révérence finale, j'ai vu tes yeux They’re terrible choices, but good, he’s learned his lesson. When sympathetic well-wishers sent around food for the couple, their lawyer made them throw it out, in case it was poisoned.And yet, at the same time and to their intense gratitude, their friends and family rallied around. Klebold understands this instinct: for many years, she regarded herself with the same harsh incredulity. “Dylan did show outward signals of depression,” she writes, “signs Tom and I observed but were not able to decode.