The Outskirts of Grief

They Knew None of the Victims Well. But Three Friends Find Little Comfort in the Distance From Tragedy.

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Life on Campus Resumes
Virginia Tech students returned to classes Monday, but they also took time out to remember those who died last Monday during a violent shooting on the Blacksburg campus.

BLACKSBURG, Va. The three words seem to be everywhere, echoing forth from this bottomless canyon. They dangle from the laundromat on a maroon banner, and tremble on the lips of a renowned poet; they parade in neon colors across the condolence cards at the makeshift memorial, and pop up in midnight e-mails from worried professors: We will prevail.

Jesse Carter and his friends have spent the past week wondering what that means for them, for the vast majority of 26,000 students at Virginia Tech who never knew any of the 32 victims, who didn't witness any of last Monday's horror, who didn't survive the worst massacre in modern U.S. history so much as avoid it.

"Where do you place yourself?" wonders Jesse, a 21-year-old senior from Lynchburg.

Where do they belong in this collective grief, they want to know, how should they be, what should they feel? The healing has begun, they hear over and over, from well-meaning officials, from preachers and parents, from the earnest counselors who hand out post-traumatic tipsheets, from the weird strangers who come to campus wearing signs offering free hugs.

But it's not solace Jesse is seeking, not yet.

It's the pain he's searching for.

* * *

Jesse Carter went to his 9 a.m. class April 16, then headed off campus to the grocery store. Cody Diggs, a 24-year-old graduate student from Richmond, was wrapping up a meeting with his advisers. Scott Lawler, 23, was at a job interview 40 minutes away in Roanoke. The friends had no inkling of the slaughter underway in Norris Hall until the news bulletins came and their voice mails filled with anxious messages.

Jesse went to the gym, surprised to find it "just slam-packed, because everyone wanted the adrenaline release, I guess. But it was nice to look across the room and see people you didn't even know, but were used to seeing, and think, 'He's okay, good, she's okay. . . .' " Realizing already that it wasn't the architecture of his life that had been altered, but the landscape.

At first, the buddies spent hours at a time watching TV, grateful they didn't recognize the names or faces of any of the victims, but not really surprised, either, given the size of the university. For all the talk of a tight Hokie community, the student body still outnumbers the population of Herndon or Greenbelt. It's more than twice the size of Falls Church. Jesse found a piece of orange elastic and tied it around his wrist, because "it just felt right." He's attended Tech all four years, like his father before him, and, in a matter of days, he'll have his biology degree.

But the grim broadcasts became unbearable. With classes canceled, the friends drifted through the week untethered, trying to find ways to fill the eerie empty hours. They shot pool and drank pitchers of beer one night at a favorite bar. Scarfed down too many Buffalo wings for lunch one afternoon and walked across campus counting the satellite trucks.

Scott and Jesse held candles and felt moved by the surge of solidarity at the campus vigil Tuesday night. Earlier that day, they had stood in line for 90 minutes to get into the memorial convocation, only to have the door shut just as they reached it.