Making Sense of Tragedy, An Impossible Task

I've been debating for the past few days whether to write anything about the Virginia Tech tragedy -- I thought it might seem out of place on a fun, silly blog like this -- but it's been so much on my mind that I just can't ignore it.

The summer after I graduated high school, 16 students and their five chaperones from my school were killed in a plane crash. At the time, I thought I had experienced some of the worst pain a young person ever could experience. I'd been told all my life, "you're young, but you're not invincible, so make good decisions." But at 17 years old, I learned in a very horrible way just how fragile life really is and that you don't have to be doing anything dangerous or stupid to have yours taken away.

In 1999, when the Columbine shootings occurred, I found out that I had been wrong before -- I hadn't experienced the worst pain. However traumatic it was for me to have lost my classmates, it had to have been unimaginably more horrible for the surviving Columbine students. To not only have lost classmates but to have lost them at the hands of people they knew, right in front of their eyes, had to have been so awful that I don't think there's even a word for it. I learned that lesson again on Monday.

All day, I stayed glued to news outlets, watching events unfold on the Virginia Tech campus. Who could have done such a terrible thing? And what could have driven him to become so desperate? The more we learn about Cho Seung Hui, the sadder the story becomes. His professors had recommended him for counseling, his classmates had called him "mean," joking about the possibility that someday he would "become a school shooter," and the police had investigated him as a stalking suspect, yet this obviously disturbed young man somehow slipped through everyone's fingers.

It's too soon to say whether we can really assign blame to anyone. To hear it told by the people who knew Cho Seung Hui, it was only a matter of time until he did something, but I think most of us could name at least one person we've met who seems unstable enough to hurt someone, someday. Disturbed does not always equal dangerous, and without explicit threats, no one could do much.

But whatever anyone knew or thought, the past can't be changed, and the name of Cho Seung Hui will go into the history books with the story of the tragedy for which he was responsible. The only thing anyone can do now is pray for the victims and their families, and hope for a quick recovery for those who were injured.

The emotional wounds will not heal easily. Those who were there, or knew someone there, might never find answers to all of their questions or any sense of peace about what's happened. And the rest of us will never have any idea what they're feeling, however much we want to show support by sharing the burden of their grief. But I think we will all hold our loved ones just a little bit closer.