Finding Their Way Back to Life

By David Von Drehle / Blacksburg

Will there come a day, graduating senior Anthony Della Calce wonders, when people see him proudly wearing a Virginia Tech cap without immediately thinking of death and sorrow?

Can Blacksburg, Va., go back to being a place where people leave their doors unlocked? asks philosophy professor Joseph Pitt.

Ashley Turnage, a third-generation Hokie, nods as her husband Neal, sports editor of the student-run website Planet Blacksburg, says, "We don't want to change. We like it the way it always has been."

No school or town could absorb the mass killing of April 16 without scars. But as the students and townies here returned to classes and volleyball and walking their babies and dogs, they were, to borrow from a poet, "making the best of their way back to life/ And living people, and things they understand." Yet how strange to pass suddenly from the year-end thrill of a spirited campus to the horror of a mad gunman, to the glare of the global media and to blinking back toward something familiar. "And I don't think it's going to be any less strange anytime soon," says Turnage.

An old man with bright eyes and wispy hair tells a story. R. Baldwin Lloyd came to Virginia Tech as a chaplain 50 years ago and never left. He was part of a lecture audience on campus the night Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. A cheer went up when the audience heard the news. Later a near riot erupted when Virginia Tech's few black students lowered the flag to half-staff. Since then, "we've opened doors to people from all over the world!" Lloyd marvels. This college town, where black and white, male and female, Puerto Rican, Indian, Indonesian and Egyptian, Christian, Muslim and Jew all died together--and mourned together--is a place that has changed profoundly over the years. A place that need not fear changes ahead.