A Mother’s Reckoning; author Sue Klebold

Living with the grief and shame of Columbine

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On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Over the course of minutes, they would kill twelve students and a teacher and wound twenty-four others before taking their own lives.

For the last twenty years, Sue Klebold, Dylan’s mother, has lived with the indescribable grief and shame of that day. How could her child, the promising young man she had loved and raised, be responsible for such horror? And how, as his mother, had she not known something was wrong? Were there subtle signs she had missed? What, if anything, could she have done differently?

A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy by Sue Klebold was selected as the WITF 2019 Summer Read. All summer, readers across Central Pennsylvania checked the book out from their local libraries and talked about it with friends, family, coworkers and book discussion groups. Over 10 participating library systems made 650 copies of A Mother’s Reckoning available to the community.

Now in its seventh year, the Summer Read project is a unique community partnership of WITF’s Transforming Health, Aligning Forces for Quality- South Central PA and Central PA library systems. It is supported by WellSpan Health and Capital Blue Cross.

Summer Read partners choose a community health topic and book, which they promote throughout the summer and is followed by a speaking event to close the program. Summer Read partners chose this book because they recognized the need to raise awareness about mental health and the need for increased access to care and resources.

Mother and author Sue Klebold appears on Smart Talk Tuesday.