Reflections on Mourning for Virginia Tech

At least half of the mourning process after an event of this magnitude involves convincing yourself that it is real. I do not think I have comprehended its reality, in spite of having spent every moment I could since Monday on campus, desperately trying to bend my mind around this horror.

For the last 9 years, I have been a Virginia Tech Hokie as an undergraduate and graduate student, and now as a part-time PhD student. On Monday, I was working my day job, which takes me about 40 miles northeast to Roanoke. I first heard of the tragedy from my wife, who is a graduate student. She was driving to school that morning, and decided instead to stop at Starbucks for coffee. She was there when the town went on lockdown, and I raced home to be with her. By the time I left, ambulances were already racing north on Route 81 to the hospitals in Roanoke; I raced south, my small Prius flanked by news vans. All the way south to Blacksburg, family and friends were calling, trying to determine if anyone we knew had been killed.

These buildings mentioned in the news – Norris, Ambler-Johnston (AJ), Torgerson, Harper – all have significant and special meanings to me. I park every Tuesday and Thursday in front of Norris Hall to go to my office in Torgerson. I usually arrive about 9 AM. Norris is where the worst of it took place, at about 9 AM but on a Monday, and Torgerson was cleared out twice last week by the shooter’s bomb threats. As an undergraduate, I lived in Harper Hall, where the shooter lived. Most of my friends, however, lived in AJ. I spent an inappropriately proportioned amount of my undergraduate career playing video games, drinking, and just hanging out there. These buildings are the sanctuaries of my Virginia Tech experience.

As I arrived in Blacksburg, I pulled into Starbucks. My wife met me as soon as I opened the door and we embraced. The whole restaurant had been sharing stories. She sat with a family who was here to tour the campus. Their son had just been accepted, and Virginia Tech was his first choice among VT, Georgia Tech, and Northwestern. At one point, the door burst open, and a woman flew through it to embrace her husband. He worked in Norris Hall on the second floor, and he had been late to work that day, due to sleeping in. His co-workers had already told him of having to step over dead bodies as they fled.

After we went home, we turned on the news. We watched in horror for a few hours. It was too much for me – I had to be on campus. The news reported that there was a vigil planned Monday afternoon on the field in front of Lee Hall. When we arrived, the news was incorrect. Instead we just walked. We walked to AJ. We just stared, the monumental, 450-room dorm just loomed large, its Hokie stone exterior unmoving. We walked to the drillfield and gazed across at Norris.

I felt a need to be close, so we walked. A few walked with us, keeping a respectful distance from the active police. The wind gusted to 40 MPH, nearly tipping us over along the long trek across the drillfield. The wind had picked up a what looked like a few small items of trash, blowing them like tumbleweeds in front of us. As we approached, we realized what was really floating through the air. They were surgical gloves, blown from the triage centers on site.

The entire area around Norris hall was cordoned off by police tape, at least a full acre. Every square foot inside the tape was covered by a police car or armored personnel carrier. As we walked, about 6 in the evening, the armed-to-the-teeth police force was unloading their M4 and M16 assault rifles. Looking at this, I was overcome by a feeling of futility. Here we had an army with assault vehicles, helmets, rifles, jackets. This army was available on a moment’s notice, and still, one lone shooter can fly under the radar and inflict this much damage. We trust, in this country, in the goodness of our countrymen and guests. What makes us great also makes us vulnerable.

I say none of this to fault the response of the school. I am not one of those calling for the resignation of our university president. In his defense, there had never been a school shooting in history that started with signs indicating a domestic dispute. At the time the shots rang out in Norris, the police were interviewing the person they thought was the prime suspect. In retrospect, of course, events like these will lead in the future to an immediate lockdown, but we must remember the information available to the university at the time.

Yesterday, Tuesday, we attended the campus memorial events. We came two hours early for the convocation in Cassell Coliseum, our basketball arena. There was already a line of people four-wide, stretching at least a mile, all people waiting to get in. There were residents of Blacksburg and students, and people from around the country were already arriving.

The line stretched by the Baptist Student Union and Latter Day Saints outreach centers. The BSU had a big sign out reminding us that God is real, hears our prayers, and is able to move to heal us. Apparently, He is simply unwilling to move to save us in the first place. I am an atheist with respect to every god I’ve met in religious literature, and an agnostic on the concept of god in general. This kind of event seems more explicable as a person’s response to something horrible in his finite, physical mind and taking action in a finite, physical world. What is the alternative? A demon torturing his soul, and an all-powerful God who lets the innocent die? A God who is willing to clean up the mess by healing the survivors, but would not intervene to save those killed?

Getting to the end of the line, I realized that we were probably 30,000^th in line for a 10,000-seat arena. About that time, they announced overflow seating in the football stadium, where they would show the convocation on the jumbotron. It was good just to be with other students. The entire field was filled with Hokies, and about a third of the 65,000 seats were occupied.

You all watched the service. I appreciated the ecumenical approach, including Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish, and Christian clergy. I will count the psychologist director of our counseling center as speaking the atheist perspective on healing. I did, however, have the thought that one of the professors killed was Indian, and most likely Hindu. I hope his family was able to find some solace.

Nikki Giovanni, a faculty member whose eloquent poetry is always a welcome addition to our engineering-focused school, captured our feelings best:

We are Virginia Tech.

The Hokie Nation embraces our own and reaches out with open heart and hands to those who offer their hearts and minds. We are strong, and brave, and innocent, and unafraid. We are better than we think and not quite what we want to be. We are alive to the imaginations and the possibilities. We will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears and through all our sadness.

We are the Hokies.

We will prevail.

We will prevail.

We will prevail.

We are Virginia Tech.

The vigil that night is almost to close to me now to describe. People absolutely poured onto the drillfield. I signed the VT memorial that President Bush signed, so filled now with signatures that I had to sign on the back. I can mourn this tragedy with Bush, even if my politics lead me to dislike him. Politics seem so far away now. I left notes on the big poster boards set up. After about an hour, there must have been 50,000 or more people on the field. I’m no expert at estimating crowd sizes. The only reference point I have is our football stadium, at it seemed we had at least a football-sized crowd.

I am not an externally emotional person. I have cried infrequently enough in my adult life that the act of so doing serves as a marker to my rational brain that something significant is happening to me. Until Tuesday, it had been fewer than three or four times. Now I don’t know how to count it, when I cried on and off all day. I’m tearing up just writing this. It happens at odd times. I broke down in the shower, just getting ready for the day yesterday, and I sobbed into my towel. Every time we sang a school song or chanted “Let’s Go Hokies!” I had to sit out until the final refrains to clear my eyes and throat. When I met people who had traveled to Virginia Tech from Texas and New York, I was choked up again.

Talking to friends as we gathered, we heard from people who knew the fallen. From the names released so far, I am not directly connected to any of the injured or killed. The closest connection to the names released so far is a biology-graduate-student friend who was teaching a class attended by Ryan Clark, the exemplary undergraduate who was graduating in May with a triple major. She had a one-on-one meeting with him scheduled for Friday to go over his semester project. Ryan was the RA killed in AJ. My friend is quite shaken. My pain is not as acute as those who have directly lost their loved ones, but this is my Hokie family. I have never felt a loss like this.

Prior to the start of the vigil, the silence alone was enough to break your heart. Just image being in the presence of tens of thousands, yet still having to converse in hushed tones to respect the reverence of the moment. Most silent of all were those standing near Norris, just off the drillfield. Sitting just a few dozen yards away were beautiful flowers, sent from universities around the country to make yet another memorial. Yet here at Norris, there were CSIs walking in and out, feet covered in cloth slippers, hands in green rubber gloves. It was too much, and both my wife and I lost it once again.

Which brings me to the press. I refuse to let my memory of the day be ruined by the vulturous photographers, but this should not go unsaid. There in the sanctuary of mourning outside Norris, a Reuters photographer stuck a telephoto lens not less than 18 inches from my wife’s weeping face and started clicking. One photo, I would have let it go. But he just kept shooting. Click-click-kik-kik-kik. In a hushed tone, I told him to leave, and to what little credit he deserves, he did. Nonetheless, the moment of mourning that he invaded so rudely made it to Yahoo’s picture feed. Sometimes we need to worry less about what posterity will remember from the day, and let us have a moment.

Worse yet were those taking pictures of the vigil. Cameramen stood atop the permanent stone podium in front of our iconic Burruss Hall, shooting directly down on the memorial itself. They were standing atop the memorial! This was where the student leaders were to speak! Finally, they were cleared out for a few moments to let the leaders speak, but as soon as the service was over and the prolonged moment of silence began, they invaded the podium like an army and the silence was broken by a machine gun fire of cameras. They blocked so much of the area behind the podium that our Corps of Cadets could not line up there as they planned, and they instead went into the crowd of students. The cameramen ignored the pleas of students who asked them to clear away from the memorial and give us 15 minutes before shooting again. The members of the corps who stood at parade rest in silent vigil, guarding the memorial, had cameras a foot from their faces to capture every last somber tear. Suffice it to say that I’m upset, but let’s not remember the day for the actions of the press.

More impressive were the thousands upon thousands of students, Blacksburg residents, and Hokies and supporters from around the world who showed solidarity in the face of tragedy. No photograph or video I’ve seen since could possibly capture what it was like to see candles raised above heads and people shouting “Let’s Go Hokies!” It seemed odd at first to shout as we do for our football team, but the cry now means so much more. I’m pushing two meters, so I had a good panoramic view of the small flames that stretched endlessly in the black night, each flickering light a person who will miss the fallen, who will never forget their memory, and who will rebuild this university stronger out of this adversity.

We are the Hokies.

We will prevail.

We will prevail.

We will prevail.

We are Virginia Tech.