A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy

by Sue Klebold

Almost everything I knew about suicide was wrong. I thought I knew what kinds of people tried to kill themselves, and why—they were selfish or too cowardly to face their problems, or captive to a passing impulse. I had bought into the cultural cliché that people who died by suicide were quitters—either too weak to handle the challenges of life, or attention-seeking, or trying to punish the people around them. These, I learned, are myths that are born out of thinking about suicide without really trying to inhabit the suicidal mind. Suicidal thought is a symptom of illness, of something else gone wrong. Most suicides are not impulsive, spur-of-the-moment decisions at all. Instead, most of these deaths are the result of a person losing a long and painful battle against their own impaired thinking. A suicidal person is someone who is unable to tolerate their suffering any longer. Even if she does not really want to die, she knows death will end that suffering once and for all.