Jerzy Nowak still has an office in Saunders Hall. Though retired from Virginia Tech, he comes here for a few hours each weekday. He keeps up with former colleagues, continues to advise two graduate students engaged in research. He calls the campus home.
One morning in March, Mr. Nowak, 70, replayed the day that changed the campus and his life. More than 12 hours after the fatal shootings on April 16, 2007, he still hadn’t heard any news about his wife. He knew only that Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, whom students called Madame, had been teaching French that morning in Norris Hall. Past dark, as he clung to a grain of hope, his daughter, Sylvie, said she was going to sleep on her mother’s bed. “I want to smell her,” she said.
After midnight, the provost came and told Mr. Nowak his wife was gone. He was now a single father with a 12-year-old daughter to raise. “We didn’t know each other at all,” he recalls.
He had spent hardly any time alone with her. As chairman of Virginia Tech’s horticulture department at the time, he oversaw a research program and reviewed grant proposals. His wife had handled everything at home. She cooked and cleaned. She drove their daughter to school and helped her with homework.
When Mr. Nowak told Sylvie the terrible news that night, they cried together. A while later, she told him she would help out, make breakfast each day. In his grief, a father heard the sounds of his daughter planning the details of their new life together.
[[relatedpackage align="right” item_limit="10"]]After Ms. Couture-Nowak’s family arrived from Quebec, one of her brothers recalled her love of triathlons. Mr. Nowak told Sylvie what a triathlon was, and she said she wanted to compete in one, too. Already a strong swimmer and swift runner, she rented a bike and started training that May.
In September, at a triathlon in North Carolina, Mr. Nowak’s eyes welled as he watched her cross the finish line, first in her age group. They hugged. She said he wished her mother could see her.
At home, in those early months, silence often filled the house. Some days they said very little to each other. He would pick her up from counseling sessions at which she hadn’t uttered a word. She refused to cut her long hair. “She was hiding,” he says.
Then, in 2008, while waiting in a line at an airport, Mr. Nowak watched his daughter strike up a conversation with other young women. They were all laughing.
“Dad,” she told him on the plane. “I will cut my hair.”
She explained that she had been closed up.
“I will open,” she said.
Recalling the moment years later, Mr. Nowak opens his clenched hands and spreads his fingers apart, like petals unfurling. “Everyone’s recovery is different,” he says.
After that day, he and his daughter talked more. They grew closer. Now 23, she is pursuing an English degree at a Simon Fraser University, in Canada. They catch up once a week or so.
For years, Mr. Nowak threw himself into the landscaping project that he and his wife had planned for their home. “An escape,” he says. He has installed a pond, a gazebo, and a boxed vegetable garden. Kale grows all year. Rudbeckia burn bright orange and yellow.
Mr. Nowak spent much of his career studying how plants react to stress. In a 2008 paper he co-wrote for the journal Traumatology, he compared the “alliances” that help plants survive to how the Blacksburg community helped his family adapt to life after the shootings. “Plants are not solitary organisms,” he wrote. “Their capacity to withstand stress is heavily dependent on their interactions with other organisms.”
As Mr. Nowak describes the compassion his colleagues, neighbors, and strangers have shown him, his voice becomes almost too soft to hear. “We’re all survivors, to some extent,” he says.
For years he dreamed of his wife. He would speak to her, she never said a word.
He describes the compassion that surrounded him. “We’re all survivors, to some extent.”
In the aftermath of the attacks, Mr. Nowak got to know Stefanie Hofer, an assistant professor of German. They had something in common. On April 16, 2007, her husband, Jamie Bishop, was shot and killed while teaching a German class in Norris Hall, close to Madame’s classroom.
Mr. Nowak and Ms. Hofer are now partners. They have a 4-year-old daughter, Leokadia. This morning he dropped her off at day care.
These days, nobody asks him the question he used to hear often. How did you get over it? “You never get over it,” he says. “You program yourself: Good or bad, you have to go through.”
