Lucinda Roy barely knew him. Yet she might have known the troubled young man, “silent behind his ostentatious sunglasses,” as well as anyone could have.
Ms. Roy, an English professor, describes Seung-Hui Cho in “End Words: A Sestina,” a poem about the student who killed 32 people at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007. Well before the shootings, she struggled to draw him out in one-on-one meetings. She shared her concerns about his troubling behavior and his writing with the university. “His catechism, sorrow,” she writes, “sat between us when we met.”
In her bright living room in late March, Ms. Roy, 61, recalls writing the poem in under an hour, revising just a couple lines. Done. She wrote it to rebuff him, to choose her own end words. “I know my students hear the voices of an unarmed choir,” its final stanza goes, “We teach peace in the stuttering light … .”
The shootings devastated Ms. Roy. Mournful, anxious, she kept thinking of the victims. She wondered why he hadn’t, for whatever reason, unleashed his anger on her. From “a lonely, windswept place,” she says, she sought refuge in words.
Ms. Roy grew up in London, in a home with no bathroom or heat. While doing the dishes, her mother would recite poems by Keats, Wordsworth, and Shelley, whose “Ode to the West Wind” transported the future writer to faraway places.
After the shootings, Ms. Roy said more to the page than to anyone. She felt she had failed. All her life she had prided herself on her way with words. Yet she failed, she says, to persuade anyone that Mr. Cho was dangerous.
[[relatedpackage align="right” item_limit="10"]] She also questioned the nature of teaching. “We have this idea of the ideal teacher,” she says, “that if you only try hard enough, you will be able to reach every student.” But surely some students are broken in ways no teacher could mend.
As the campus grieved, she felt lost in the classroom. As a writer, as a professor, she had always embraced strangers and strangeness, but now that was difficult. She withdrew, sharing less of her own story with students. She feared eliciting anything troubling, a disturbing piece of writing.
“End Words: A Sestina” first appeared in No Right to Remain Silent, Ms. Roy’s 2009 account of her experiences with Mr. Cho, whom she had urged to seek help. She describes her frustrations with the university’s response to her efforts: “It could be hell trying to get help for a troubled student at Virginia Tech.”
Mostly the book was met with silence on the campus, she says. Condemnation, too. Even friends questioned her decision to revisit the tragedy. Some administrators, she says, felt she had betrayed the university. She understood why: “I was taking a critical eye to all of us.” On campus she would see people she had known for years turn and walk the other way just to avoid her.
Others offered support. Some colleagues stopped in the aisle of the supermarket to embrace her. Some wrote kind notes, all of which she kept. And her husband, Larry, helped, by not rushing her out of grief.
Once Ms. Roy’s name was well known, many strangers spoke up. Before a television interview, a cameraman approached her and said, “My son is Cho.” She was startled. He was worried, he explained, about his own son’s mental illness.
We have this idea of the ideal teacher, that if you only try hard enough, you will be able to reach every student.
Over the past decade, Ms. Roy has received thousands of emails from people who are afraid. Afraid of someone, for someone. The messages come from parents, brothers, sisters, spouses, friends. She responds to most.
Those messages have convinced her of something: Most everyone knows someone who’s struggling, who might pose a danger to himself or others. Maybe they know of a student suffering behind sunglasses, like the silent kid at Virginia Tech. “There are always people that nobody really wants to acknowledge seeing,” she says.
Though the years after the shooting were difficult, Ms. Roy never thought of leaving. She loves Virginia Tech, its unpretentiousness and diversity. These days she’s as open, or almost, with her students as she was before. Their enthusiasm and curiosity, she says, helped pull her back from despair.
This afternoon, Ms. Roy beams while describing a young woman in her fiction class who’s written a promising novella. “She’s going to do incredibly well,” the professor says, drawing out the word “incredibly.”
Over the years, Ms. Roy has written more poems about the massacre and its aftermath. A five-poem cycle concluding with “End Words: A Sestina” appears in Fabric, a book of poems published this year. At an upcoming reading on campus, she plans to share one of the poems, “A Mind Full of Winter,” about Mr. Cho. It begins: “Violence, sleep’s serial killer, has the patience of a saint.”
Ms. Roy still thinks of the shootings every day. There’s no moving on, she says. There’s just resolve — “that you will not let the past tense dominate the future,” she says. “The continual struggle, in the present, is to find a way to do that.”
