Editor's Note

They received little help in retrieving Leslie's body.

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I have spent more than 30 years basically dedicating my life to the proposition that any feeling, no matter how rare, how profound, how inexpressible it seems to be, can, in fact, be put into words. The trick is, you can't always do it directly. Sometimes you have to circle around the feeling, construct little outbuildings, erect some scaffolding, bring in some mood lighting, lay down the right soundtrack, but eventually, you get there. Or so I believed.

And then I read the sentence at the top of this page. It comes about a third of the way through Liza Mundy's unforgettable story about the parents of a victim of the Virginia Tech massacre (See article), and my faith wavered.

The thing is, you can read that sentence about a stranger, or an acquaintance, or even a friend, and you can shake your head in sadness and move on. But can you ever understand how it would feel if the body in need of retrieving was your own child? Are there any words, arrayed with any devastatingly clever verbal stratagem, that could even touch the essence of that?

There's a very obvious, prosaic reason why that sentence just leapt up and walloped me. My 18-year-old daughter headed off to college for the first time in August. It seems like she'd been growing toward that moment from the first unsteady toddling step. She'd always had such enthusiasm for learning, such a desire to be involved in the conversation, to be involved in the world. Now the delight of seeing her ensconced on her gorgeous leafy campus, among instant best friends forever (and, no doubt, these really will be the friends whose importance will resonate through the coming decades) has lit up my entire fall. I feel such joy for her, for her eagerness and excitement, for all the challenges and adventures and relationships that await her, for the future that seems to hang so palpably in the air as she floats along the well-trod paths between dorm and classrooms.

It was hard to turn the car around and leave her there, though we took solace in the sense that she was in a beautiful place, a protected place.

They received little help in retrieving Leslie's body.

I am just on the verge of beginning to imagine how that illimitable joy, how that ineffable love, could all come down to that sentence, which is, after all, a life sentence, and I just . . . stop. I can't allow myself to go there, not all the way. Not while I have a choice. A choice Holly Adams and Tony Sherman will never have again.

Tom Shroder is editor of the Magazine. He can be reached at shrodert@washpost.com.