Five days after the April 1999 massacre at Columbine High School, and just hours after they cremated the remains of their son Dylan — cremation was the only option, really, because a grave site would certainly be vandalized — Sue and Tom Klebold returned to their Colorado home. “A mother is supposed to know,” Klebold says. About A Mother’s Reckoning 
 
 The acclaimed New York Times bestseller by Sue Klebold, mother of one of the Columbine shooters, about living in the aftermath of Columbine. *** 
 
 Based on his mother’s account, the impression one gets of the young Dylan Klebold is of a straightforwardly wonderful child. She called him her “sunshine boy” on account of his blond hair and sunny nature, and “our little trouper” because of his determination to see projects through. I knelt beside the shape resembling my son and touched the carpet that held him when he fell.” 
 
 She understands why people blame her. Over and over she asked herself, “Did we hug him enough?” 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Students are led from Columbine high school on 20 April 1999. When she and Tom and Byron reassure each other that they won’t commit suicide. The fact that, a few years later, they would fail to sever their younger son’s friendship with Eric Harris when the two got into similar trouble was, Klebold says, testament to Harris’s charm and their faith in Dylan’s good sense. “For years after the attack, I resisted blaming Eric for Dylan’s participation,” Sue writes. They carry greater moral force, or less moral ambiguity, than those of perpetrators. “Given what I have learned about psychopathy, I now feel differently. “Dylan did show outward signals of depression,” she writes, “signs Tom and I observed but were not able to decode. If we had known enough to understand what those signs meant, I believe that we would have been able to prevent Columbine.” 
 
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 Some signals flash so bright they seem hard to miss. Finally, a year before the shooting, the boys stole some electrical equipment from an unattended van and were arrested. The Klebolds were appalled, but also relieved that, because it was a first offence and the boys came from “good homes”, they were let off with some counselling and community service. He’s doing things he’s never done before. And later: “oooh god i want to die sooo bad . I find the violence and hatred seething off the page in Eric’s journals almost unreadably dark.” Or as Andrew Solomon, author of “The Noonday Demon,” suggests in the book’s introduction: “Eric was a failed Hitler; Dylan was a failed Holden Caulfield.” 
 
 Sue also blames herself, in part. That is why I say to people: if your children misbehave, if a young man is irritable, if your daughter has a lot of somatic complaints, this could be a mental issue. “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. “Coming to understand Dylan’s death as a suicide opened the door to a new way of thinking for me about everything he had done,” she says. In A Mother’s Reckoning, she chronicles with unflinching honesty her journey as a mother trying to come to terms with the incomprehensible. During Dylan’s senior year, his English teacher told Sue and Tom that one of his papers was disturbing. In the end, Klebold says, “I felt, well, if I move away, I’m just going to be the mother of that killer. How could she not realize that their son was stockpiling weapons? Filled with hard-won wisdom and compassion, A Mother’s Reckoning is a powerful and haunting book that sheds light on one of the most pressing issues of our time. When he didn’t make the high school baseball team, he retreated into computers. “To the rest of the world, Dylan was a monster; but I had lost my child.” 
 
 That child, born on a September 11th and named for a poet who raged against the dying of the light, was a good kid, Sue explains. I don’t know any other way to respond to him than with love.” 
 
 It doesn’t change anything. “I wish I had acknowledged his feelings instead of trying to talk him out of them.” 
 
 It’s not that she didn’t love him.
– When Sue Klebold learned that her son, Dylan, was involved in the Columbine High School massacre on April 20, 1999, she prayed not for his safety, but for his death—"the greatest mercy" she could imagine. That prayer was answered when Dylan, along with fellow shooter Eric Harris, committed suicide in the school's library after killing 12 students and one teacher and wounding 24 others. In A Mother's Reckoning, out Monday, Klebold apologizes to the loved ones of her son's victims, provides an account of her family's life after the shooting, and catalogs the warning signs she failed to see. "Most of all," Washington Post critic Carlos Lozada writes, "it is a mother’s love letter to her son, for whom she mourned no less deeply than did the parents of the children he killed." Here are some of the "painful and necessary" insights and details from the book: Dylan was "easy to raise … a child who had always made us proud," but hard on himself when he failed, "and his humiliation sometimes turned to anger." Klebold says her son is responsible for his actions, but the "role depression and brain dysfunction can play" must be acknowledged. She resisted blaming Eric Harris for years. "Given what I have learned about psychopathy, I now feel differently." From the book's introduction by Andrew Solomon: "Eric was a failed Hitler; Dylan was a failed Holden Caulfield." Visiting the school library after the shooting, Klebold recognized her son's shape marked on the floor. Weeping, she knelt and "touched the carpet that held him when he fell." Klebold was never angry with her son, she tells the Guardian, until she saw the videotapes he and Harris had made before the shooting. "He was trying to latch on to things that made him feel angry. But I just couldn’t sustain that anger." On the morning of the massacre, Klebold says her son's shouted goodbye to her had a "flat, nasty" sound. "Was he saying to me, you were a bad mother?" Regarding Dylan's depression: "If we had known enough to understand what those signs meant, I believe that we would have been able to prevent Columbine."