Wisteria, spring 2008, Blacksburg, Virginia
Photo: Jennifer Schwanke

When you’ve reached a certain age and leave a place you’ve loved, keeping in touch with friends left behind can involve as much heartache as pleasure. Deaths become a depressing staple of the news they pass along. And given that the place I left a little more than three years ago is Blacksburg, Virginia, there’s been awfully much in that category to report, most of it inspiring as much bafflement as heartache.

Even before last spring’s massacre at Virginia Tech, there was the still-unfathomable rampage by a young local named William Morva. I didn’t know Cho Seung-Hui or any of his victims, but I did know William. Blacksburg’s a small town and I was a regular at the same downtown coffee shop he haunted. I talked to him often. He charmed my toddler daughter. He had some strange ways noticeable even to her; she once wondered aloud why she had to put on her shoes before going out to play when had we both witnessed William strolling barefoot in a snowstorm. But harmless eccentricities were all they seemed to be.

Then William went bad crazy. First he got himself locked up in the local jail for attempted burglary. One night a while later he allegedly gunned down a hospital security guard during an escape. The next morning, the first day of Tech’s fall semester, he allegedly ambushed and killed a local deputy searching for him along a nature trail near campus. He cowered in the woods until he was caught hours later, but not before Tech went on lockdown and rumors swirled about a gunman taking hostages in various campus buildings.

Only months later, of course, that very situation would come eerily to pass.

Considering all that, the news in January of the death of my friend Trev Smith’s 73-year old mother Dawn came as a kind of relief. It wasn’t a happy occasion but it was expected, and peaceful. And if not for a rich vein of self-sufficiency pumping through at least a couple of generations of the Smith family, it might even have been ordinary.

But it wasn’t ordinary at all, at least not by modern American standards.