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

By Tamara Jones
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 24, 2007

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.

"No!!" they remember hearing themselves shout, furious and swearing, then begging. "Please," Jesse remembers imploring, "we'll stand." Didn't they deserve to be in there more than the media, more than townspeople or visiting dignitaries? A guard reopened the door and said there were 40 seats left. Jesse and Scott, joining the stampede, made it through.

Cody watched the speeches on TV from home, hugging his three big dogs close. In the circle of friends, he had the most time invested in Tech, more than six years so far, on his way to a doctorate in aerospace engineering. But he couldn't find comfort in the crowds. "I was really paranoid," he admits later. With President Bush and other VIPs coming, the convocation struck Cody as "the perfect setup" for a more massive attack. "I thought something worse would happen," he says.

"Are you kidding ?" Jesse argues. "I'd rather be around the president with all the security he has. That seemed like the safest place in the whole world to be." They are sitting in a juice joint across the street from the school.

The cold wind and snow flurries of that Monday morning have become the bright sunshine and beckoning warmth of Friday afternoon. Someone has tied gigantic yellow ribbons on the black iron fence surrounding this part of the campus, as if those lost are merely away. Everyone, including Jesse and Cody, is wearing orange and maroon to show the Hokie spirit. The movie theater down the street promises half-price tickets to any Tech students, and a tattoo parlor offering a memorial VT design is doing a bustling business, drilling 4.16.07 forever into flesh that welcomes a pain that at least is tangible. Even the nonchalant rudeness of the young waitress in the juice joint comes as relief.

Cody and Jesse wander toward the Drillfield, stopping on the broad sidewalk between the administrative building and the community pride wall where candles burn and flowers wilt in the memory of 32 strangers slain.

The friends cast a skeptical glance at another one of the freelance huggers on the prowl, a girl looking desperately eager, her sign offering not only an embrace but a Hershey's Kiss as well. No one approaches her. Cody admires all the dogs that pass by, identifying each by breed, and wishes he'd brought his setter and Doberman. Behind them, yellow crime-scene tape still ropes off Norris Hall, but streamers have escaped and tangled in a tree.

A grim little choir is crowding people off the sidewalk as they pass, chanting the same lyric over and over. What were they saying? Cody and Jesse ask each other. It sounded like "We are the ones you've been waiting for." No, Jesse thinks he heard "We are the ones we've been waiting for," but quickly concludes aloud, "that wouldn't make sense, though." Cody dryly states the obvious:

" None of this makes any sense."

On the way back, a girl Jesse has known since freshman year spots him and rushes up to wrap her arms around him.

"Hey, hey, how are you doing?" she cries.

"Good seeing you," Jesse says, hugging back. " Glad seeing you!" He asks the question everyone asks this horrible week. "Did you know anyone?"

She launches into something about Cindy's boss's daughter passing away and someone's stepson and the first pitch at a baseball game tonight, and Jesse nods even though he's lost the thread in this confusing new game, six degrees of survival.

They hug again, say how glad they are to see each other twice more, then go their separate ways.

Jesse shows Cody the pinwheel garden outside the art department, where pink-and-orange pinwheels attached to pencils have been planted in the ground with the invitation to "please pick one in memory." Why? Cody wonders. Jesse picks one, makes it spin, and answers sardonically.

"Because pinwheels make everyone happy."

They catch up with Scott at Starbucks and talk about what to do over the weekend. Scott, who's from Springfield and about to get his master's in health education, vetoes Frisbee golf and suggests hiking to a waterfall instead. Jesse, whose mother died of cancer when he was 8, goes to the campus Relay for Life, scheduled before this nightmare. He does his laps, then hears the announcers say that Caitlin Hammaren's father was there to run her laps in memory of his slain daughter.

When he reconnects with his friends that night, Scott wants to watch "Black X-Mas," but Jesse refuses. No horror movies, he insists. He's had enough horror this week.

* * *

They've all shed tears. Scott felt moved by rival schools like the University of Virginia offering solidarity and condolences. For Cody, it's when the news focuses on parents who've lost kids, or kids who lost their parents. His own father died in a motorcycle wreck when Cody was 2. His favorite dog, a Weimaraner, is named Willie in his honor.

"You're laughing and laughing and laughing, and suddenly you're overcome with sadness," Jesse explains. He felt the tears well at the candlelight vigil, and again yesterday as classes resumed for the first time. His afternoon genetics class was the worst. He knew already, from a professor's e-mail, that the stocky boy who sat in front of him had been killed in Norris Hall. When he walked in yesterday, Jesse remembers, "everyone in the class was sitting silently eating a Jolly Rancher lollipop." He compares it to the Buffalo wings last week, and to the church ladies handing out homemade cookies to students as they returned to school.

"Eating our feelings as a sort of condolence," is how he describes it. He wishes he had known the person, Mike Pohle, whose seat is now empty in front of him. He remembers him coming into class on what would turn out to be his last Friday alive, how he asked if there was a quiz today and Jesse said yes just to mess with him, and now he is left with a feeling closer to incredulity than sorrow.

"That's it?" he asks. "I'll never get to know him better?"

His father and brother keep telling him that he's going to remember this for the rest of his life, that he should take note. Jesse knows they mean well, but believes the details of this week are embedded in him forever now, an invisible tattoo.

Is there a difference between becoming a part of history, and history becoming a part of you?

They could all take the option of freeze-framing this semester now, walking away with their grades intact, not bothering with final exams or projects. But all three want to keep going, even though there's only a week left, because finishing just seems important. From there, Cody is thinking about doing some research in California before completing his doctorate here. Scott hopes to land a job in Florida. He's craving sunshine. Jesse will work for a friend's Internet business before considering grad school, maybe here, maybe not.

"How do you balance this?" he wonders. If there's no name for this space between sorrow and survival, is there some measure of its distance? "How sad am I supposed to be on a scale of 1 to 10?" he wishes he knew.

They have no funerals to attend.

They hung out at Cody's the day before returning to class again, but couldn't summon the energy or enthusiasm for the hike they had planned, Jesse reports.

Cody started rooting around in his closets and pulled out a 15-foot trampoline, which they assembled in the yard. They mixed up pina coladas and took turns bouncing, half-drunk on laughter and rum, jumping as hard and high as they could, exulting in that airborne moment of pure weightlessness.