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• Columbine survivors' advice to Virginia Tech

Photos by Linda McConnell | Special to The Roanoke Times

Karen Kimes of Littleton, Colo., wipes away a dusting of snow from the Columbine Memorial, which honors the people killed at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999. Opened in September in Clements Park, adjacent to the school, it has been a quiet place for students, faculty, family and community members to come and remember the tragedy.

A panel of the Columbine Memorial carries a quote from the memorial's groundbreaking: 'They're here; can you feel them? Our angels ......' The memorial uses quotes from the community to memorialize the tragedy.

• Full coverage of the shootings -- and healing -- at Virginia Tech

Signs of stress

The following are signs that adults need help with their stress:

• Difficulty communicating thoughts, sleeping, maintaining balance or concentrating.
• Becoming frustrated easily.
• Increased drug or alcohol use.
• Limited attention span.
• Poor work performance.
• Headaches or stomach problems.
• Tunnel vision or muffled hearing.
• Colds or flu-like symptoms.
• Disorientation or confusion.
• Reluctance to leave home.
• Depression, sadness.
• Feelings of hopelessness.
• Crying easily.
• Overwhelming guilt and self-doubt.
• Fear of crowds, strangers or being alone.

Ways to ease stress

• Talk to someone about your feelings — anger, sorrow and other emotions — even though it may be difficult.
• Don't hold yourself responsible for the disastrous event or be frustrated because you feel that you cannot help directly in the rescue work.
• Take steps to promote your own physical and emotional healing by staying active in your daily life patterns or by adjusting them. Eat healthfully , rest, exercise, relax, meditate — a healthy outlook will help you and your family.
• Maintain a normal household and daily routine, limiting demanding responsibilities on yourself and your family.
• Spend time with family and friends.
• Participate in memorials, rituals and use of symbols as a way to express feelings.
• Use support groups of family, friends and church.
• Establish a family emergency plan. Feeling there’s something you can do can be very comforting.
• Seek professional assistance if the self-help strategies fail or if you find you are using drugs or alcohol to cope.

SOURCE: Harvey Barker, New River Valley Community Services

BLACKSBURG -- "Need assistance?"

The question beckoned in bold black and white, a sign attached to a tent on Virginia Tech's Drillfield.

It was the first day of classes at the university where a few months earlier, on April 16, the worst school shooting in American history occurred.

Counselors sat under the canopy with ready ears, informational fliers on mental health, big round cookies and small packs of tissues. But for the most part, students traipsing across the Drillfield ignored the offer for help.

Dozens, however, were drawn to another tent directly across from the counselors where vendors hawked posters of rock stars and imitation art. Darr Soli, a freshman from Bridgewater, flipped through the posters.

"I think the best kind of counseling is let it go, let's get on with it," Soli said. "If people want to get on with it, they need to start acting normal."

Ten months have now passed since April 16. People are starting to act normally.

Soli's sentiment is echoed by many who want to know why the tragedy can't be put to rest, why the media prolongs the anguish with continuing coverage of painful memories, why well-intentioned counselors insist that talking is healthy.

Marjorie Lindholm knows why.

"People don't talk about it here," the 25-year-old woman said. "It's something not spoken."

The events of April 16 were particularly distressing to Lindholm, who lives 1,500 miles away from Blacksburg but only two blocks away from Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo.

Lindholm was in the school on April 20, 1999, when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 13 people and injured another 24 before committing suicide.

"Even now," she said, "the Columbine thing holds me back."

The scars that bind Virginia Tech and Columbine High School aren't so visible now. Except for permanent memorials that stand on Tech's Drillfield and in the park next to Columbine, the tangible signs of mourning are gone.

Some, however, will carry the events of April 20, 1999, and April 16, 2007, forever.

The key to moving on, the survivors of Columbine say, is a mix of individual trial and error and recognizing that the community as a whole needs mental health outreach. Similar tragedies, such as the Feb. 14 shootings at Northern Illinois University, will continue to rattle nerves in Blacksburg and Littleton. Recovering is not an easy task.

Lindholm was a giddy girl of 16 when she went off to school on that cool, hazy April day.

"That child never came back," said her mother, Peggy Lindholm.

Marjorie Lindholm watched Dave Sanders, her favorite teacher, slowly bleed to death in a science classroom where she was trapped for four hours following the boys' rampage.

Just getting through the day in the first year after the shootings took all of her energy.

"At first, I didn't want to talk about it at all. I just couldn't talk to anyone," she said. "Maybe it was because I was only 16 and didn't know how."

Looking back, Peggy Lindholm believes she unthinkingly rushed her daughter into counseling.

"She tried counseling but it was too soon, and she felt like she was being pushed. I ended up getting real sick over it, getting a divorce."

A trained counselor, Lindholm said Marjorie is the oldest of her three children. The younger two are both living independently now, but Marjorie is still at home.

"She still struggles," she said of her daughter.

"Today, she has no friends. She doesn't date. That kid dropped out of high school. She totally flipped."

Recently, Marjorie Lindholm did go back to school. A biology major at the University of Colorado, she said she still doesn't have a comfort zone there. But it's better than that first year back at Columbine.

For many at Virginia Tech afflicted by the horrors of April 16, Marjorie Lindholm said, the months and years ahead will be challenging.

"The ones who saw a lot, it's going to be a really hard row back. You get panic attacks all the time. You get anger. You get depression."

Columbine High Principal Frank DeAngelis said he got into counseling immediately after the tragedy.

"A friend of my parents had served in the Vietnam War," the 53-year-old DeAngelis recalled. "He told me I needed to talk to someone as soon as possible. He said you can't predict when it's going to come on."

"It" is post-traumatic stress disorder.

Anyone who has gone through a terrifying event -- war, rape, car crashes, natural disasters -- can develop PTSD.

DeAngelis, who's completing his 12th year as principal at Columbine, came close to leaving his post after the shootings. He's glad now that he stuck it out.

"For me, staying at Columbine has really helped me heal. I think I really would have struggled if I had left," he said.

Many of his teachers did leave. DeAngelis said 75 percent of the staff members who were at the school in 1999 are now gone. Of the 25 percent who stayed, many still have PTSD, he said.

Although it isn't clear why some people experience PTSD and others don't, it is clear that specific factors can contribute to the likelihood of someone developing the anxiety disorder. According to the National Center for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, the intensity of the trauma, the closeness to the trauma, the intensity of the reaction to the trauma and the amount of support received after the trauma are among the factors.

For DeAngelis, counseling helped him identify his needs. It did not erase his emotional reaction.

"I walked right into gunfire that day," he said. "If I hear balloons pop, I'll break into a cold sweat. I'll drive by certain places and it'll take me back to April 20. I developed shingles five years after the attack.

"Now," he added, "I'm at the point where I know if something is not right. For me, it's a lack of concentration. There are times I'll run a red light, forget my phone number. Then I need to go in for a maintenance checkup."

From experience, DeAngelis said he knows what those involved in Virginia Tech's tragedy can expect.

"People will constantly be telling you what you need. Part of it is trial and error, but you're not in it alone. That's important to realize."

The year between the shootings at Columbine High School and the first anniversary of the tragedy was horrendous for the community, according to Jeanne Oliver of the Jefferson Center for Mental Health, the main agency involved in the Columbine aftermath.

Oliver pointed to a string of events that left the community reeling: the murder of two more Columbine students at a sub shop near the school, the discovery of a young child found killed and left in a trash bin across from the school, the suicide of a mother whose child was paralyzed as a result of the shootings and the suicide of another parent who just couldn't cope.

The stress was compounded as lawsuits stemming from the tragedy began, as accusations against Jefferson County officials became ugly confrontations and as investigative reports detailing the Columbine shootings were released.

Oliver noted that in the first 18 months following the Columbine tragedy, 12,000 people in the Littleton area received mental health assessment or treatment for trauma-related symptoms. The mental health center quickly realized that one of its major roles was to educate the broader community about trauma and its effects.

By offering training sessions and workshops, providing handouts and newsletters and organizing community outreach programs, Oliver said her agency made it a priority to reduce the stigma associated with mental health treatment and to make treatment readily available.

"It was easy for public officials, the media and others in the community to understand the needs of the 39 deceased and injured victims and their families," Oliver said. "It was much harder to understand the impact on thousands of other people in the community and the need to provide mental health services for them as well."

In Blacksburg, efforts to address community mental health needs began shortly after April 16.

Amy Forsyth-Stephens, director of the Mental Health Association of the New River Valley, knew immediately that there were thousands of what she calls "secondary victims."

She thought of the rescue workers, police officers, the clergy, the doctors and nurses, the school children, the elderly, the victims of past violence.

"We have 168,000 people in the New River Valley," she said. "It's like there was an earthquake and it happened on the Virginia Tech campus. But it shook the whole community."

Forsyth-Stephens and others in the mental health field stepped up interventions to address the community's response to trauma, forming a group called the Center for Community Healing After Tragedy, or CHAT. The group is still active, providing services to groups of people affected by April 16.

"The mental health needs are still at a very high level," Forsyth-Stephens said earlier this month. "We all manifest our stress in different ways. It may be showing up right now, especially as we start to turn toward the anniversary."

The past year, she said, has made it clear that she needs to take her work in mental health to the next level.

"Everybody that was in Blacksburg knows it's been a hard year," she said.

On April 16, Crystal Woodman Miller, 25, was touring to promote character building and nonviolence among students in junior and senior high school.

Sitting on a bus with a band en route to Fargo, N.D., she saw a text message from a friend pop up on her cellphone: "Have you heard what's happening in Virginia?"

"I absolutely lost it," Miller said. "Then the media started calling."

Miller was one of only a few Columbine students who made it out of the library alive and without serious injury after experiencing what she calls "seven minutes of unthinkable shock and horror."

Her journey, she knows now, began that day.

"Initially, you're grappling with emotions you didn't know existed," she said. "After that wears off, you're faced with extreme sadness.

"For me at 16, it felt like life was over. I just wanted to throw in the towel," she said, recalling the two years of almost constant nightmares she experienced, the weight loss, the repeated anxiety attacks, the guilt she felt whenever something made her smile.

Ironically, Miller can now say with conviction that Columbine was the best thing that ever happened to her.

"What was intended to destroy my life has enhanced my life," she said. "Going through this has given me compassion and a greater purpose. I want to be a world-changer."

Miller, who writes of her Columbine experience in her book, "Marked for Life," said she was going in the wrong direction before the tragedy -- drinking, partying and focusing her energy on selfish pursuits. Hiding under a table in the library as Klebold and Harris unleashed their fury, she said she changed.

"Under the table, I cried out to God. Some call it a foxhole confession. It stuck for me. Under that table, I realized what was important.

"I still went out and got drunk afterwards because I didn't know how to deal with the pain," she admitted. "But I started going to church."

Change didn't come immediately for Miller. Her senior year at Columbine High was a paradox. She needed to be around people but she didn't want to be around people because human touch, she said, "hurt my body." She couldn't sleep but couldn't get out of bed. She needed to talk but couldn't find the words.

"By then, people wanted to move on and act like it never happened," she said. "I wasn't ready for that yet."

Through her affiliation with the church and because of the notoriety she received after the Columbine killings, Miller began traveling and witnessing the effects of violence in other places.

"The next summer, I was asked to speak in Northern Ireland. I spoke about the root of hatred and that started to open my eyes. I realized there were people who were hurting more than me."

Miller said eventually she found a counselor who was a good fit. Continually sharing her story with others, she said, brought healing, too. But the key for Miller -- one that is echoed by Lindholm and other Columbine survivors -- was finally forgiving the two people who stood for hatred.

"It took years before I could come to a place of forgiveness for the killers of Columbine," she said. "That didn't come easy, but I realized my bitterness was only affecting me. I finally came to the conclusion that those boys weren't going to steal my joy forever."

On April 16, when the media started calling her, Miller again found herself facing TV cameras. She cut short a planned trip to Germany and came to Blacksburg for a few days after the tragedy.

"I was incredibly amazed walking through the campus, especially the concern for the shooter," she said. "The amazing forgiveness. I know how the process goes. I know it takes time. I saw myself there."

She has much advice for those still feeling the effects of April 16, for those who aren't yet feeling "normal."

Be active. Exercise. Find a good support system.

"Reach beyond yourself. Once you go through something difficult, reach out to others going through something difficult."

And talk, she said. "I would encourage people to talk about it, talk through it. ... It was definitely a journey for me."