In Blacksburg, a Solid Reminder of Lives Lost

She had a student whose sister was shot four times, and Vance remembered how he came to class that following Monday, shirt tucked in, and politely asked if he could stand and address the class. " 'I know you have questions. My sister was in that room where so many were killed,' " Vance remembered him saying. "And for 10 minutes, no one spoke. And by the end of half an hour, no one was quiet."

Vance said she was glad to see the memorial was not hidden off to the side, "in a corner, so we wouldn't have to be sad."

"People are very afraid of grief and a devastation like this, but they needn't be," she said. "I think our problems will increase if we pretend we've moved on completely. . . . We're changed now, and it would be unwise to pretend it hasn't changed us."

University Landscape Architect Matthew N. Gart said the goal was to honor as much as possible the initial memorial. An early discussion to place the stones in alphabetical order gave way to preserving the original, random order.

"It came down to honoring the spirit of what the students originally did," Gart said. "We just especially embellished that original layout in a more permanent fashion."

That a 33rd stone -- one for Cho -- also sprouted in that original memorial came into the discussion as well, he said. Before construction was finished, a woman crawled under the fence, asked workers for a few moments and then started counting the stones, Gart said. She was upset there wasn't one more.

"There are still people who want 33," he said. "It really is a deep, spiritual issue for people."

Lang, 37, a man with sunburned biceps and a perpetual layer of dust on his boots, said he would have had a hard time cutting a 33rd stone.

"If someone does something like that, they don't deserve to be remembered or recognized," he said.

Lang missed Sunday's ceremony and regretted not seeing the culmination of two months of work. People have stopped him in grocery stores to ask if he was the one who made the stones. He shirks uncomfortably under their attention.

Preparing the stones was an emotional process, especially when it came down to sandblasting each name on the smooth, sloped top of each stone, he said.

"When you actually put the names on, sandblast them on, you remember," Lang said. "Every one you do makes you think about what happened."

At the end of the ceremony, each family was given the original stone from the temporary memorial. But because there were a few divorced parents, identical stones had to be made for eight of the victims. Lang cut those as well. He also shaped small, paperweight-size ones for family members.

Reema Samaha's family, of Centreville, received one. After Sunday's ceremony, when the field was mostly cleared, they lingered by the slain teenager's stone. Her mother, Mona Samaha, said she liked the purple and pink hues that streaked through it.

"She liked colors," Samaha said, adding nothing more.