www.newrivervalley.com

Courtesy of the Cloyd family

Austin Cloyd wades into the ocean off Virginia Beach in January 2007. For the teen, this was a giddy ''Guess where I am?'' moment. The image was taken by friend Pearl Blevins, whose shadow crawls up the photo's edge.

Courtesy of the Cloyd family

Austin (center) and her parents attend senior night for Blacksburg High School's basketball team in 2006. Many people reached out to the Cloyds after Austin's death.

Photo by Jared Soares | The Roanoke Times

For Bryan Cloyd, the new home being built for the family on Brush Mountain has become an escape after losing his daughter, Austin, in the Virginia Tech shootings last year. The two-story, timber-frame house in Montgomery County where he spends much of his time offers views of Lane Stadium and much of the New River Valley.

Photo by Jared Soares | The Roanoke Times

Bryan and Renee Cloyd drive through Christiansburg looking for bricks for their new home on Brush Mountain. The family began planning the building before the Virginia Tech shootings.

Photo by Jared Soares | The Roanoke Times

Bryan Cloyd speaks with a student after class at Hillcrest on the campus of Virginia Tech. He is teaching one class this semester.

Austin Michelle Cloyd

• Born April 24, 1988, nine days overdue, she weighed nearly 10 pounds. Doctors had told her mother, Renee, she was going to have a boy.
• “No one can do everything, but everyone can do something. And if everyone does something, then together we can change the world.” — Austin’s favorite quote. Author unknown.
• Austin was going to have one child with her husband and adopt three or four others. Always tall for her age, she had guy friends, but not boyfriends. In high school, she began to wonder why, and asked Renee.
  “You’re a threat to high school boys,” Renee told her. “They’re not mature enough for you.”
  “OK, I’m in college now, where are they?” Austin asked her during the second semester of her freshman year.
  “You may have to wait until grad school, honey, I don’t know,” Renee said, laughing.
• Austin and her dad, Bryan, enjoyed scuba diving together and took other trips that involved just the two of them. Bryan took her on an impromptu trip to Paris one weekend — there was a special deal on airfare and Renee suggested he take her because she was studying French. They saw the Eiffel Tower and Moulin Rouge — before dark. The Cloyds traveled often as a family as well. By the time Austin started college, she ha d already seen Australia, Curacao, Belize and much of Europe.
• Barack Obama’s “Dreams From My Father ” had such an impact on Austin, an avid reader, that she gave a copy to one of her teachers to read during her junior year. She hoped to work on the Illinois senator’s presidential campaign.
• Austin wasn’t a great athlete. Renee coached her in basketball and when she compares her daughter’s movement on the court to a ballet dancer, it’s not because of her gracefulness but rather her unusual gait, bounding from toe to toe as she ran up the court. But she was always tall for her age, growing to nearly 6 feet. That was enough for her to make high school volleyball and basketball teams. Blacksburg High School honored her by retiring her jersey number at a December tournament they named in her honor.
• The Austin Michelle Cloyd Honors Scholarship enables honors students to pursue a cause that improves social, economic or political conditions of poor people. It was endowed with funds the Cloyds received from the Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund. Cloyd Scholars are encouraged to intern in a public service role between their second and third years at Tech and participate in service activity between their third and fourth years. The scholarship’s description states that Austin “was passionate about social justice issues and felt great compassion for people, particularly children, who live in poverty.”
  Blacksburg High School has also established a scholarship fund in Austin’s name.
• Afraid of water when she was small, Austin later became a Virginia Tech lifeguard and swim instructor.
• A member of the university honors program, Austin was pursuing a double major in international studies and French.

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The dead deer startled him.

Bryan Cloyd didn’t see the carcass, lying across his lane on Interstate 64 near Ashland, Ky., until it was too late. He did the only thing he could — drove straight over it and looked in his rearview mirror.

His 17-year-old daughter, Austin, was driving the Toyota Camry behind him. She swerved. Her car ran into the median and flipped twice, end over end.

He thought he’d just watched his daughter die.

It was June 2, 2005. Bryan and Austin were moving the family possessions from Champagne, Ill., to Blacksburg, Va., where Bryan had taken a job as an accounting professor at Virginia Tech.

Austin’s car came to rest on its roof. A man who stopped to help yanked the car door open, and she crawled out.

She escaped with only a scratch on her arm and a sore neck.

But that day, Bryan and his wife, Renee Cloyd, realized that their lives could change in a heartbeat. Bryan made a deal with his daughter. He would get a hug from her whenever he wanted one, regardless of its ramifications on her teenage coolness.

One year ago Wednesday , Tech student Seung-Hui Cho fatally shot 32 students and faculty in two attacks on campus before killing himself. Austin, a freshman, was among the victims.

In hindsight, June 2, 2005, became “a blessing,” Bryan said. “Because it did bring us closer together, and it did make us more aware about how fragile life was, how fragile life is.

“And I got more hugs.”

Admittedly teetering on the brink of depression the past year, the Cloyds have searched for ways to cope, often finding solace in helping others. The couple have led students on trips to repair homes with Appalachia Service Project , Austin’s favorite service organization. Renee still volunteers with two churches and Blacksburg High School. Bryan is teaching a new course at Tech about service to others.

Both helped launch the university’s VT Engage campaign, asking people to pledge thousands of hours of community service in memory of those who were lost on April 16.

Friends marvel at the Cloyds’ strength, energy and optimism, but Bryan and Renee say they’re learning as they go, relying on friends, therapists and their church.

Like others who lost family April 16, the Cloyds’ personal tragedy received worldwide attention.

“People, they assume they know you now,” Renee said. “And they also say things to you that make me feel uncomfortable sometimes just because of the whole 'courage’ and 'your strength’ and that kind of stuff. It’s like, 'You know, you don’t see me when I’m crying driving down the street or in the grocery store or in the shower. You only see me when I put on that face.’ Because I have to have that face to make it through the next day.”

A close-knit family
Talkative and friendly, Renee is quick to laugh, inhaling a deep, honest guffaw. It’s contagious partly because it sounds so funny coming out of the mouth of a 46-year-old woman with a S outhern twang.

Growing up in Charlotte, N.C., the middle of three children, she was active in sports, a good student and never got in much trouble. But she always liked to talk. She volunteered as a hospital candy striper and suspects the nurses were relieved when she left. She chatted with the patients so much that meals she was delivering grew cold.

She and Bryan met each other in Sunday school in Charlotte when they were both 22. Bryan was an accountant; she worked in advertising. They married in November 1984, just nine months later.

Bryan is a project-oriented person, able to block out distractions and focus on the details of a task, whether it’s building a garage or teaching a class. After they met, Renee says, his project became wooing her. They fell in love.

He prepared a candlelit dinner for her the night he proposed, stalling — much to Renee’s annoyance — so she didn’t arrive until the sun had set.
Austin was born April 24, 1988, nine days after she was due.

A year later the family moved to Bloomington, Ind., where Bryan enrolled at Indiana University to get his doctorate in accounting. He wanted to be a professor, to give him more time with his family. Renee was a stay-at-home mom. By the time their son, Andrew, was born in July 1991, their daughter had developed a loud personality. Flipping through a photo album this January, Renee stopped at a picture of 3-year-old Austin looking at her dad with her arms spread open. The point of contention appears to be a Candy Land board between them.

“See what she’s doing there?” Renee asked, smiling. “She’s setting him straight.”

Bryan, the youngest of four children and a high school debate champion in his hometown of Georgetown, Ky., has a more cerebral approach to things than his wife. Renee describes the basic difference between them as this: He thinks first and talks later, and she has no filter between her brain and her mouth. At some point, Austin came around to his method of communicating.

But Austin’s personality often reflected who she was with. She quietly read books while sitting next to Bryan during trips and saved her more boisterous side for Renee. When Austin was away from home, she woul d call her mom and blurt out, “Guess where I am?” She’d then chatter about how beautiful her mom’s alma mater, Wake Forest University, was or how strange it was to stand in the ocean along Virginia Beach in January.

Austin liked listening to Gavin DeGraw. Her favorite foods were banana pancakes and Caesar salad, and she liked to watch “One Tree Hill” — details Renee included as part of a questionnaire for Austin’s senior-year psychology class at Blacksburg High School. The project was designed to see how well parents knew their children.

“Mom, you know me so well,” Austin told Renee. “You’re the only parent to get every one right.”

Austin and her mom volunteered with Appalachia Service Project , a Christian service organization that repairs the homes of poor people in rural Appalachia. They went on an ASP trip together each summer while Austin was in high school. They hammered nails into roofs, shared tight living quarters and made new friends, many living in poverty.

Austin’s ASP experience and traveling helped open her eyes to the larger world and shaped her politics. Issues such as mountaintop removal mining and genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region resonated with her. She participated in Model United Nations events in high school. At Tech she was a member of the honors program and joined Tech’s International Relations Organization .

Early freshman year, Austin took a Greyhound bus to Washington, D.C., to attend a Sept. 11 peace conference with other honors students. She returned with two mementos: a light blue rubber bracelet engraved with the word “peace” in multiple languages and some nasty blisters on her feet from walking around the city in sandals.

April 16
Renee realized something was wrong — really wrong — that Monday morning as she drove to Blacksburg’s Heritage Hall Nursing Home to see Bryan’s father, who was undergoing physical therapy. She had heard about the Virginia Tech shootings, but her concerns were as vague as the early news reports. Then, driving south on Main Street about 10:20 a.m., ambulance after ambulance sped past her toward campus.

Something grabbed at the pit of her stomach.

At Heritage Hall, Renee saw live video of Norris Hall on television. She knew Austin had an 8 a.m. class in Torgersen Hall and a 10 a.m. in the Graduate Life Center, but she didn’t know exactly where Austin went in between. She sent her a text message, but hit the buttons on her phone too fast: “where r t call me.”

No reply came.

Renee ran next door to Montgomery Regional Hospital. At the front desk, she gave a description of her daughter — nearly 6 feet tall with striking red hair, Austin was hard to miss. When told that Austin wasn’t there, Renee felt relieved. But she was still shaking.

The hospital chaplain asked if he and others there should pray for her.

“No,” she told him. “Let’s pray for those who are going to get bad news today.”

They sat, bowed their heads and prayed.

The accounting professor looked at the numbers to convince himself that his daughter was OK. Austin is one of more than 25,000 students on campus, Bryan told himself. Locked down in Pamplin Hall, a few buildings away from Norris, he heard reports of the death toll rising into the 20s. Still, the odds, on the surface, provided hope.

Bryan kept hoping after learning that Austin had a 9 a.m. class in Norris; after phone calls to her went unreturned; after his wife met him at the Inn at Virginia Tech with no answers after trips to two hospitals.

He kept hoping, even though the fact that his colleagues wouldn’t leave his side should’ve hinted that they anticipated the worst.

The Cloyds waited at the Inn at Virginia Tech — the central gathering place for families that day. Before it got dark that evening, they decided to go home. A friend from Blacksburg Baptist Church drove them. On the way Bryan’s cellphone rang.

“I was just in a meeting,” a federal agent he had met earlier in the day said. “There was a board with names on it. Your daughter’s name was there. And she’s in the hospital. They’ve taken her to the hospital in Roanoke.”

They drove to Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital. No Austin.

They rode back to Blacksburg in the dark.

At 2 a.m. they were told no more announcements would be coming until morning. The Cloyds knew the situation was bleak. Still, they hoped.

“Have you considered the possibility she’s hiding somewhere?” Bryan asked an officer during the last phone call he made before going to bed. “Maybe she’s scared, maybe she’s hurt.”

Bryan knows he fell asleep that night, because he awoke crying, a strange feeling and a first for him.

The phone calls from police came about midmorning . They asked the Cloyds if Austin had any identifying marks. Renee mentioned that the blisters from her trip to Washington left scars on her feet. There was a photo — a morgue photo — police needed to show them. They asked the Cloyds to meet them at the Inn at noon.

The Cloyds waited in a room at the Inn for more than an hour, while the officers were stuck behind the motorcade of President Bush, in town for a memorial convocation. The photo didn’t really look like Austin. The animated, smiling face friends mention when describing her was expressionless. But the red hair was a giveaway.

The Rev. Tommy McDearis, pastor of Blacksburg Baptist , had his arms around the Cloyds as they looked at it.

Renee wailed, the sound coming from the deepest place inside of her, from her soul. An English major who studied Irish literature, she woul d later describe the sound as “keening,” a term derived from Gaelic used to describe a high-pitched, mournful lament. She turned to Charlotte Smith, minister of music and worship at Blacksburg Baptist.

“Is that her?” Renee asked, not ready to believe what she’d seen. “That is her, huh?”

Celebrating Austin’s life
Friends surrounded the Cloyds that week — Bryan and Renee still talk about how much it meant to them that people screened their phone calls, took out their garbage and just made sure they weren’t alone.

In addition to being a pastor, McDearis is one of two chaplains for the Blacksburg Police Department. He spent time comforting officers and other victims’ families. During the days leading up to her daughter’s funeral April 21 at Blacksburg Baptist, Renee asked him repeatedly how he was holding up and if he was getting enough to eat.

“Probably as much as any family I’ve ever dealt with in a tragedy, they really accepted right from the very start, 'This is not just about us. It is about us, and it’s a terrible event, but it’s also about everybody else,’” McDearis said.

The funeral home made the programs pink — Austin’s favorite color — and Renee made sure they were lightly scented with her daughter’s perfume. It was a nod to Reese Witherspoon’s character in the movie “Legally Blonde” and her “lightly scented pink resumes.” That line cracked Austin up.

Renee fussed with her daughter’s appearance one last time — her hair was a bit too frizzy and her lipstick needed to be darkened. But the funeral home did a good job masking her injuries, she said, allowing them to have an open casket at the funeral. Austin wore a pearl necklace and the “peace” bracelet from Washington .

In lieu of flowers, visitors were asked to make donations to ASP. The Cloyds said the organization received about $100,000 .

Friends took turns at the lectern , sharing stories about Austin that elicited laughter.

Larissa Mihalisko and Alyssa Katz, both Tech students, were the first to speak. They rambled, talking about what a daddy’s girl Austin was, recalling how she’d decorated Bryan’s office door on his birthday, March 26.

That story was tough for Bryan to hear.

Renee was still the attentive mom, making sure everything was perfect and checking to see how everyone was. Knowing that her daughter was at peace helped her do that.

“I might not have been OK,” Renee said. “But I knew that she was OK. Because I knew that she was OK, and I knew that some people would be really struggling with that, I wanted them to find comfort.”

Renee “put her game face on,” Mihalisko said.

The gathering was the celebration of Austin’s life the Cloyds hoped it would be. It was the best day of their week.

A reason to get up

In the weeks that followed, Renee and Bryan would wake up early — about 4 a.m. — and spend the small hours steeling themselves for the outside world.

“You didn’t want to go to sleep because if you go to sleep, then you forget,” Renee said. “Then when you wake up, then it hits you again. And then you have to get numb again so you can get through the day and then dread going back to sleep.”

But sometimes sleep provides comfort. Dreams afford the Cloyds occasional visits with their daughter. Renee received one of Austin’s “guess where I am” phone calls in a dream last spring.

“You’ll never believe how beautiful it is here,” Austin said. “It’s gorgeous, mom. If I could take a picture, I would. I’ll draw you a picture. I’ll get it to you somehow.”

Renee awoke at 3:36 a.m. with tears in her eyes, but smiling. Her daughter was at peace.

For all the moments that provide strength, it’s a constant struggle to keep going.

The day before another dream, Renee had thought how nice it would be to just stop. The thought of not getting up, not eating, not putting on “that face” appealed to her. In the dream, she’s in the shower about to collapse. But then Austin walks in with a small smile on her face.

“It’s OK,” Austin said. “Go ahead and collapse. But then you’ve got to get up and get going again.”

Renee lay in bed for an hour, thinking about the dream. “She doesn’t want me to quit,” Renee thought.

She got up.

When a secretary at Blacksburg Baptist went on leave during the summer, Renee volunteered as her replacement and ended up informally counseling several church members who lost loved ones. The time she spent there allowed her to be around friends and gave her a reason to get up in the morning.

The Cloyds remain active church members, assisting in baptisms and teaching a Sunday school class for college students. The church remains a regular stop for Renee during her weekly errands.

“This church, they just held us, you know?” she said.

Faith and forgiveness

A former church youth director, Renee describes her faith as simple — she’s OK not knowing the reasons behind God’s decisions. Her faith journey has been ongoing through most of her life. But after April 16, Bryan felt the need to examine a faith that he described as “stuck in neutral.”

He spoke regularly with McDearis, talking through ideas such as God’s power and individual free will. He also looked to other religions for insight. He read “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl, Rabbi Harold Kushner’s “When Bad Things Happen to Good People” and “Amish Grace,” which delves into the forgiveness shown by the families of victims of the school shootings in Nickel Mines, Pa.

Some of those Amish families visited Tech in August to deliver the “Comfort Quilt,” made by Ohio elementary school students after Sept. 11, 2001, as a show of support for those grieving. It has since been passed around to wounded communities, from Hurricane Katrina victims in Mississippi to Nickel Mines.

“These are the guys who are so good at forgiveness,” Bryan thought as he awaited them at the Inn at Virginia Tech.

While the Cloyds say they haven’t gone through an “angry stage,” the idea of forgiving Cho hadn’t occurred to them those first few months. Bryan was lying awake nights, thinking about what happened in his daughter’s French class April 16.

In a note thanking the Amish for their visit, he came to a conclusion about his feelings: “God’s real, heaven’s real. Austin’s in heaven. Austin, if she’s in heaven, she can’t be angry. So why would I be angry?”

Renee has been puzzled by her lack of anger toward the shooter. Maybe it’s been misdirected, maybe it’ll come later, but she hopes it won’t. She knows living with anger won’t do her any good. That might be why she’s avoided it.

“I guess I forgave him from day one,” she said. “Maybe that’s the chicken’s way out.”

Bryan still skips over newspaper paragraphs when he sees Cho’s name. He just doesn’t think he can handle knowing details about the man.

The Cloyds have avoided involvement in the movement by some victims’ families to close the state’s so-called “gun show loophole,” even though they believe in the cause. They choose instead to focus their energies on the less-confrontational cause of service to others.

“Having lost our daughter, I don’t think I had the emotional fortitude to lose something else,” Bryan said.

They’ve also stayed away from other fallout from the shootings — investigative panels Gov. Tim Kaine formed last summer and the threat of lawsuits. The Cloyds worry about exposing themselves to angry people.

“I don’t want to try to convince somebody they shouldn’t be angry,” Bryan said. “Who would I be to try to tell somebody you shouldn’t be mad that this person was at the university for four years, had obvious signs of problems and walks in one day and kills your kid in class. People have a right to be mad about that. But I don’t want to be mad about that.”

Instead, Bryan has sent messages of support to families who have lost children and has suggested books for them to read — but he’s careful not to do so too soon. A week or two after losing a child, you’re really not ready to start reading books, he said.

For months after April 16, Bryan felt trapped in a bad dream. He would tell people about Austin’s death, hoping they’d wake him from the nightmare.

“What? What are you talking about?” was the reply he waited for. “You’re just imagining this. It’s not real.”

By the winter, he’d stopped hoping for that response and had taken to introducing himself as just “Bryan” to avoid the possibility that someone would connect his last name with the tragedy.

Even today, innocuous questions such as “How many children do you have?” leave him speechless. He can’t say “one.” He can’t say “two.”

Surrounded by memories

Bryan escapes on top of Brush Mountain, to the north of Blacksburg. With only one class to teach this semester, he spends most of the daylight hours up there, directing construction of a new home the family began planning before the shootings.

He can point out the bend in the gravel road he, Austin and Andrew reached while hiking April 13, a cold and rainy Friday, before turning back. Austin told him she woul d wait until the road was complete and she could drive up to see the lot.

You can see Lane Stadium and much of the New River Valley from the two-story, timber-frame home.

The house includes a large limestone chimney handcrafted by a stone mason. Austin’s Hokie stone from the first, student-created memorial on the Drillfield is set among the rock of the first-floor fireplace. Her stone blends in with the others, on the left side to match her political leanings.

Her ashes are kept in a mahogany box Bryan made years ago for Renee. Modeled after a Chinese tea box, it sits behind a large photo of Austin on a mantle in the Cloyds’ home.

The Cloyds still occasionally visit the memorial of 32 engraved stones on the Drillfield, Renee gathering all of the pink pebbles she can find and placing them on Austin’s stone.

Memories of their daughter come unexpectedly through a song or a scent. A random strand of her red hair will find its way into an envelope to be saved.

Renee says she ha s built a room inside of herself with memories of Austin, and in her mind she’s able to visit it and talk with Austin. But Austin will never be older than “almost 19,” Renee said. “She won’t be 32 with a child. She’ll always be my baby.”

A room in the Cloyds’ rented home north of Blacksburg has boxes stuffed with photos, cards, posters, T-shirts and even portraits people painted of Austin. The Cloyds call it “Austin’s room,” even though she never lived there. The family rented a different house in town during her senior year.

“You need a blanket?” Renee asked, sifting through the closet. “We just have stuff. T his is a beautiful quilt, b ut I don’t know what we’re going to do with it.”

But the quilts and prayer shawls were needed on Mother’s Day, which fell on the same weekend as Tech’s graduation. Renee lay down that Sunday and covered herself with every single one of them.

“That was a tough day,” she said. “I needed all those prayers.”

Beginning to heal
The Cloyds are embarrassed by the attention they get because of the circumstances of Austin’s death. Renee doesn’t believe in the idea of quantifying pain — a lot of people are still hurting from April 16, she says, and other tragedies are no less painful.

She checks in frequently with Austin’s close friends to see how they’re doing, exchanging e-mails and occasionally meeting them for coffee. The Cloyds plan to gather with some of them later this month to celebrate Austin’s birthday.

“She’s kind of been like my therapist through all this,” Mihalisko said. “I feel like it should be the other way around.”

The Cloyds hope talking about their ordeal will help others through similar struggles. To that end, Bryan thinks the university events Wednesday honoring the victims of April 16 should honor everyone who died at the university in the past year.

“They have friends, and right now the people who really need the most help are the friends of students who have died in the last couple of months,” he said.

It could be an annual event in years to come, he said, to remember lost friends from the past year on April 16 and reinforce the idea that life is fleeting. As hard as it is to walk past the memorial that sits about 100 yards from his office, he thinks it is an important reminder and that its place in the middle of campus is appropriate.

“It sounds cliche, but if you don’t live like you know you’re going to die, you’re not really living,” he said.

For Bryan, that means spending more time helping others and less time worrying about things such as professional status and savings accounts. In July, he went to Barbourville, Ky., on his first ASP trip.

Renee and Austin had that trip planned, and Bryan went in Austin’s stead. An accomplished handyman, the work suited him. It felt good to be around optimistic young people.

“Bryan became the dad to all those staffers,” Renee said.

Last summer, the Cloyds worked with ASP to organize trips to the mountains of Lee County in far Southwest Virginia. About 70 students went over two November weekends. The project kept the Cloyds busy, but more than that it put them alongside people who wanted to react positively to the shootings and find meaning in how they responded to a senseless act.

“The most important thing that might happen from all this is not what happened to the victims and not what happened to the families,” Bryan said, “but what lessons the other 26,000 students take away from it.”

There’s more laughter than tears for Renee on ASP trips. She’s at ease with the students, playing charades, chatting or leading the caravans.

“We were getting filled up a little bit by giving to others,” she said.

The second November trip helped take some of the pain out of the couple’s 23rd anniversary. The night before they left, Bryan said they might need to start planning their three spring ASP trips to get them through the holidays.

The Cloyds celebrated Christmas and exchanged gifts. Renee bought a small, pre-lit Christmas tree that they decorated with candy. The ornaments used for past Christmases didn’t come out. Christmas Day was quiet. McDearis called that evening.

“You’re the first person to call, thank you,” Renee said. She began to cry.

“Renee, I’ve been getting all the phone calls,” he said. “Everybody’s been wanting to know how y’all are doing, but they didn’t know how to call you and ask you.”

After the holidays Bryan kept busy working on the house and teaching his class on service. He’s helping students with their proposals for service projects and talking about topics an accounting professor doesn’t normally explore — finding purpose in life and looking for solutions to injustices.

But Renee bottomed out in January, in the lull between the holidays and organizing more service projects.

She tried to keep busy, taking food to the workers at the house, exercising and tutoring through a program with Blacksburg United Methodist Church. But she wasn’t sleeping well and wasn’t as quick to laugh. At times she zoned out during conversations, staring into space.

In the first months after the shootings, the Cloyds could grieve together. By January, the dynamic had changed. They don’t always talk about their bad days for fear of ruining the other’s relatively good day, Renee said. And the emotional exhaustion of the past year makes it hard for them to lean on each other.

“Sometimes I know if I’m crying, Bryan may not have the fortitude to help me at that point because he doesn’t have anything else to give me,” she said. “And vice versa.”

And after nearly a year of searching for ways to cope, Renee gets frustrated. She just wants someone to fix things, to bring her daughter back. As April 16 draws closer, she feels a growing tension that she compared to a tidal wave.

“It hit a year ago, and the ocean has sort of been balancing itself out a little bit and all. But you can almost feel there’s a sucking of — something’s building again. And I don’t know what that’ll be.”

The Cloyds plan to be on campus for some of Wednesday’s memorial events, but not the candlelit vigil. The Cloyds felt the vigil at Tech in February for five slain Northern Illinois University students was far more appropriate.

The Cloyds got there early to help students set up and signed boards with messages for the NIU community.

“I’m so sorry for your loss and your pain. Let others give you comfort. And cry — God bless all of you. — Renee ”

“Be strong and know that you are loved. — Bryan”

Minutes before the vigil, Tech student Katelyn Asselin spotted Renee. Asselin’s parents were neighbors of the Cloyds when they first moved to Blacksburg. The Tech senior lost friends and a professor last April. She went on an ASP trip with the Cloyds.

The two women hugged.

“How are you doing?” Renee asked her.

“I’m OK if you’re OK,” she said.

Renee smiled and nodded.

“I’m OK.”

About this story
Staff writer Greg Esposito created the narratives for this story after spending six months interviewing Bryan and Renee Cloyd, their friends and Austin’s friends.