Our fragility and our complexity, so clear yet so confusing, are front and center this week and it gets harder to watch as it continues to unfold. The little tiny tragedies of the mentally ill occur every day away from the glare of camera lights without public witnesses to tell the stories, shrouded in unnecessary shame, but severe mental illness is so frequently characterized by intelligence, absolute certainty of rectitude and refusal to willingly submit to treatment, that it most often becomes dangerous quite simply because it isn't treated.
Each of us brings unique perspective to every subject and when something huge and terrible happens, we all look at it differently. There are few wiser or more poignant perspectives on what's unfolded this week than those that can be found in Paula Reed's blog posts, Virginia Tech and Loners. Paula speaks from experience tempered by the passage of time, with insightful and beautifully expressed remembrances about that April 20th, eight years ago, and how it changed everything forever. I thought of her first when I checked in at CNN.com late Monday morning and saw there had been another shooting in a school, and then, as what was happening settled in, I suddenly thought of our friend, J, a junior engineering major at Virginia Tech. I thought of calling him, as I remembered that his cell number is programmed into my cell phone, a remnant of last summer's wooden bat season when he and The Youngest were teammates (although he was the elementary school buddy of Middle Son), but it was only for a split second, because I suddenly thought of all those frantic parents, each calling their child's cell phone, remembering the times I felt an urgent need to reach my children away at college. I remembered how intensely I needed to talk to The Oldest on September 11th, 2001, when he was only three weeks away, a freshman, and it felt like he was on the other side of the world, and the dozens of times I called Middle Son's cell on Saturday morning August 27th, 2005, trying to wake him to implore him to gather his things and his friends and to leave New Orleans as quickly as possible. I thought last Monday of the families and friends whose calls went unanswered, who slowly had to realize what they didn't want to believe, but ultimately knew, long before they were told, because of the silence. How many times did they listen to the recorded greeting of their child, already lost, and leave messages? Of course I didn't call J, but suddenly realized that the fellow with whom I'd been emailing all morning as we prepare for our spring baseball season, my twentieth and last spring as a baseball parent, is one of J's dear father's very closest friends. He would certainly know, so I emailed him a simple question, "Have you heard any news about J?" It was probably two hours before he answered, "He's safe. He's been locked down in the engineering building," and it knocked the wind out of me. I hadn't realized I'd been holding my breath.
There were so many signs that this young killer was so terribly disturbed that it's hard, in hindsight, to accept that this tragedy couldn't have been averted, and many, including his family, surely mourn amidst a flood of regret because, in this case, the signs were not missed. Seeking help for mental illness is so unfortunately and wrongly rife with shame, and those of us who move in the world fairly comfortably, grounded, for the most part, in reality, like to think that this doesn't just happen, but that it must be caused. Otherwise, we would have to come to terms with the fact that it could happen to us, or to someone we love, come to terms with the possibility that we could suddenly find ourselves, through no fault of our own, at a complete loss for how to love the monster in our midst.
As a parent of college students, I've not stopped thinking about that freshly wounded community in Virginia as I've read the stories of those lost, such a huge volume of promise and human beauty just gone, knowing how the road winds that leads a person to a particular college, like the roads that led those people, truly the best and the brightest, to be in that place at that tragic moment in time. Then I read Monica's post and followed her link, visiting the VT website, now a Memorial Page, for the first time today and I realized how much more has been lost than just these beautiful children and their wise and courageous teachers, because a university is a living community, a complex organism and I suddenly realized that I was filled with sadness at that loss, not just the individual loss but the collective loss.
It's so hard and so wonderful at the same time to send our children off to college and we all worry every moment they're out of our sight. We also come to love those universities and their locales. My intense sense of loyalty to New Orleans is an extension of my son's choosing to go to college at Loyola, and I know what it's like to watch helplessly as a university for which I care is wounded. While changed, Loyola was lucky, and will be rendered stronger for their hardship, but I also remember seeing the pictures of a badly flooded Tulane and watching the frightening saga of students and faculty stranded for days, surrounded by rancid water at Xavier, in horror. New Orleans' colleges and universities are still struggling to recover and their struggle hasn't been free of controversy as they pared themselves down to leaner institutions to survive the expense of rebuilding and the sharp decline in enrollment. Now, I realize that, in addition to mourning those for and with who lost their lives, their children, their friends or just their innocence, in Blacksburg last Monday, we also mourn Virginia Tech, a venerable institution, terribly wounded, moving forward one day at a time with its injury not yet completed, waiting for it's own post-mortem, knowing they will have to face the university's part in what has happened, have its scars held open for examination, and limp forward, forever changed.
(h/t Neal, Cousin Pat & Adrastos)
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Update: Here's a great post from Scout Prime at First Draft on the sorry state of our mental health system, and how that system makes it impossible to get (or provide) help for even serious mental illness. While reading Scout's post I saw Pete Early, author of Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness on CNN and, between them, I've come to the jaded conclusion that we shouldn't be surprised it came to this.
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