Two years later, Virginia Tech, survivors look to the future

BLACKSBURG Life as usual revolved around the Drillfield one afternoon last week at Virginia Tech.

Students crossed it on the way to class. A guy set up a chair on the grass and read a book. Cars puttered around the oval perimeter. A female student led a campus tour of high school students and their parents. At one end of the field, people streamed in and out of Newman Library.

Everyone moved along, paying little attention to the half-circle of 32 small stone blocks situated along the edge of the field, essentially at the center of campus. The memorial for the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history now is a regular part of Tech, like Burruss Hall or Lane Stadium.

Two years later, the Tech community will gather around the stones today for a noon ceremony and an 8 p.m. vigil. They will pray and cry and honor the 32 students and teachers killed by Seung-Hui Cho.

Some might find their own answers to the question of whether Tech has healed. Others won't.

And though healing remains difficult to grasp, it's easier to see that two years after the deaths on April 16, 2007, Tech still is doing what it always sought to do: teaching young people and improving lives.

You can see that resolve in the professor who now runs the school's peace center. He will swallow his pain for the sake of his cause next week when he sets up his office on the second floor of Norris Hall, where Cho's bullet pierced the left side of his wife's forehead and killed her.

You can find it in the lab where the doctor is planning experiments on mice to fine-tune methods for lowering high blood pressure in obese people, an increasing strain on the American health-care system. The day after the massacre, the students in that class were right back in the lab, tinkering with the mice, searching for answers.

And you can hear it in the voices of students already counting their college memories.

. . .

Jerzy Nowak walked into Norris Hall for the first time since the massacre in June 2007, when Tech opened the building to families of the 30 people Cho killed there.

"I had very soft legs when I went in and even softer when I left," Nowak said.

He met Jocelyne Couture in 1989, when they were teaching at Nova Scotia Agricultural College. The school is located outside Truro, Nova Scotia, an isolated Canadian town where residents referred to people such as Jerzy and Jocelyne as being "from away." He was from Poland. She was from Montreal.

They loved to debate. On their first date, they discussed the curriculum of early-childhood education. After they married in 1990, they often argued about how Jerzy should organize his garden. So there was Jocelyne on April 15, 2007, spending her Sunday afternoon trimming a rambling rosebush away from the utility boxes in their yard.

They went to work the next morning -- Jerzy to run Tech's horticulture department, Jocelyne to teach French.

Jerzy didn't see her again until April 22 at the funeral home. He looked for the scratches from the rose bush on her hand. He noticed that the bullet had chipped her wedding ring.

He had Jocelyne's body cremated and, last July, scattered some of her ashes at Cape Forchu, a tiny fishing village on the southwestern tip of Nova Scotia. It was her favorite place, and she took him there to see the lighthouse shortly after they started dating.

Jerzy began repairing his life long before that final goodbye. The day after the shootings, he picked up the phone and began replacing her name with his on the bills.

Staying busy kept him sane. Before he knew it, he was swept up in a new task, running the Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention. His daughter Francine hatched the idea for the center during a media interview after the shootings.

He took a three-year leave from horticulture because he felt a "moral obligation" to run the center, which he hopes will foster cooperation between campus groups. It's already happening, Jerzy said, grabbing a flier in his office.

The flier advertises a speech given last night by Greg Mortenson, whose Pennies for Peace program raises money to educate children in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The center's affiliated club, Students for Non-Violence, organized the event with Tech's International Relations Organization.

Jerzy's life without Jocelyne remains busy. One day, he represents the center at a presentation in New York. Another, he listens as his 14-year-old daughter, Sylvie, talks about boys at school.

Jocelyne's death left just the two of them in the house, and Sylvie withdrew from him until last fall, wearing her hair long and draped across her face.

"I hardly had anything in common with her," Jerzy said. "We had to build our relationship."

Then there is the pressing matter of the wooden box in his office. He will pile his belongings into it for the move to Norris Hall's reconfigured second floor, a place where part of his life ended and another begins.

"I still don't know how I will adjust," he said. "But I know I will adjust, because the fulfillment of the mission of the center and its objective is dominant in this case."

. . .

Out on the fringes of Tech's campus, beyond the library and way past the half-circle of 32 stones, is a laboratory where Deborah Good conducts her research.

Good is an associate professor of human nutrition, food and exercise. She describes herself in simpler terms. "A tinkerer," she said.

Her specialty is using mice to study adult-onset obesity. Her research matters, because 34 percent of Americans are obese, according to the National Center for Health Statistics' latest data, a 2005-06 survey. In surveys from 1988 to 1994, 22.9 percent of Americans were obese.

Last month, Good received a $30,000 grant from Tech's Carilion Research Institute to work on a project with Roderick Jensen, a biological-sciences professor at Tech, and Richard Seidel, director of research and education at Carilion Clinic, a Roanoke-based health-care organization that runs eight nonprofit hospitals.

Their project, which Good plans to begin in the summer, will include fasting experiments on mice that could help determine the specific effects of water-only fasting for obese people with high blood pressure.

"This is kind of controversial as a regimen," Good said. "So that's one of the reasons that we're interested in figuring out what's going on physiologically and at a molecular level."

Good's team is working to design a program that is easier for an obese person to handle than going a week without eating.

Two years ago today, Good's students also were doing gene work on mice to study obesity. A couple examined the brain, another the muscle. Good e-mailed them after the shootings and told them they didn't have to come to the lab the next day.

The students wouldn't hear it. Most responded to say they were coming anyway.

Whatever drew them back to the lab -- eagerness for the experiments, or just the chance to escape the chaos around them -- they decided, as so many have at Tech, that there had to be something better worth searching for tomorrow.

Contact Darryl Slater at (804) 649-6026 or dslater@timesdispatch.com.