Sam Dean | The Roanoke Times

Tracey Lane attends a concert recently at her church in Narrows, Va., where musician Craig Whittaker performed “I’ve Seen Jesus,” a song he wrote in honor of Lane’s son, Jarrett, who was killed at Virginia Tech on April 16. Tracey Lane said it is hard to move on when there are reminders of the Tech tragedy all around her — memorial ribbons on cars and more shootings in the news — but she is doing so with the help of her community.

Audio slide show

• "He's holding my hand"

NARROWS — Tracey Lane pulled up to her home the night of April 18, back from an errand no parent ever would want to run. She’d gone to her son Jarrett’s Blacksburg apartment to pick up his suit. The plan had been for him to wear it at graduation, and now here she was, planning to bury him in it.
Some 2,100 people call Narrows home, and just about all of them knew Jarrett Lane.

They’d watched him slop along the banks of Wolf Creek, floating Cool Whip container boats to see which way the current moved.

They’d seen him driving his pride-and-joy Honda Civic, with the cross dangling from the mirror and the “LANE 24” license plate — an ode to his Narrows High School sports number.
Many knew he’d already been accepted to attend graduate school, on full scholarship, at the University of Florida: On April 15, the day before he was gunned down in a Virginia Tech engineering class, Jarrett had stood up at Narrows First Baptist Church to share the happy news — and to praise God for it.

“Everybody took his death very personally,” said the Rev. Tim Cline, pastor of the church. “People in the town … it was like they had lost part of themselves.”

Tracey Lane hadn’t planned to attend the Wednesday night prayer vigil at the church, which sits catty-cornered from her house. But when she arrived home and saw all the cars crowding the parking lot and spilling onto neighboring streets, “We understood the magnitude of it all,” she recalled. “And something in me just said: ‘You need to go.’ ”

Some would call it strength. Tracey Lane calls it faith.

For almost a year, it has gotten her out of bed every morning, and it has allowed her to do something maybe even more remarkable: Instead of sinking into her own sorrows, she has helped the people of Narrows cope with theirs.

Hungry for details

As her children grew into adulthood, she wasn’t one of those mothers who needed to know every detail of their lives. Jarrett, the youngest of her three kids and the only boy, told her what he wanted her as a mother to know.

“And that was fine. But about his death, I need to know everything,” she said in an interview last summer.
At the time, Jarrett had been gone three months, and Tracey Lane was on a quest. In order to process the tragedy that befallen her son, she needed to be able to picture it in her head.

For months, she approached Monday mornings with dread. About 9 a.m. — just before the Norris Hall shootings began — she would sit at her work station at TMD Friction in Pulaski, where she makes automotive brake pads, and run through the scenarios in her head:

Did Jarrett suffer? For how long was he scared?

This much she knew already: He’d been sitting in the second row of G.V. Loganathan’s advanced hydrology class when Seung-Hui Cho entered the room, shot one student and then Loganathan and then systematically began shooting the rest, up one row and down the next. He went down the hallway to the other classrooms. Then he came back a second time. Three people in the room survived.

Over the summer, more details emerged: a police timeline, followed by an autopsy report and, later, an exhaustive list of recommendations prepared by a governor-appointed panel.

Tracey would never learn the precise order of the 32 killings, though officials told her that Jarrett was probably the third or fourth person shot in his class, his death more than likely instant. “I’ve had a hard time dealing with the fact that I know Jarrett knew he was gonna die, and I’m sure he was scared.”

In the beginning, she thought about these things as she drove his car to work, listening to his Christian music CDs. She fingered the little bottles of men’s cologne he’d left in the console of his car.

She confided in her mother, Nancy Morgan, the retired schoolteacher who’d helped raise Jarrett; his father left when he was 3 months old. She accompanied Tracey on every April 16-related outing, even though she sometimes needed a wheelchair to get around.

They live together in a brick house on a tree-lined street. And friends say it’s her mother’s faith that inspired Tracey’s reliance on her own.

Nancy Morgan lost a son, too, when Tracey’s brother, Chris, died in a motorcycle wreck. He was 25.

‘So many friends’

Tracey’s mother was with her when Tech professors took the family on a tour of Jarrett’s engineering projects. They were eager to learn more about Jarrett’s college career.

Professor Marc Edwards explained how the students tested water storage methods in his lab, figuring out the best ways to keep metals from leaching into the supply. “Some students have book smarts, but when they get in the lab where you do stuff with your hands, it doesn’t click,” Edwards told the family. “Jarrett had it all.”

They learned about the grad student who happened to have the same cellphone ring-tone as Jarrett. Whenever she heard it ring, she reached for her phone — only to discover that it was Jarrett’s phone ringing instead. “You’re making me feel bad because you’ve got so many more friends than I do,” she told him.

That day, a few minutes after class, the student’s cellphone rang. It was Jarrett calling — trying to make her smile.

“You can teach kids a lot,” Tracey said later, crying, as the story was recounted. “But to be kind and to help others, they have to learn that on their own.”

In July, she was invited to walk through 206 Norris Hall, the classroom where Jarrett died.

It was pristine and scrubbed to perfection, not a hint of blood in sight.

Tracey stood where Jarrett’s desk had been and, with her mother at her side, she prayed. It’s what Jarrett would have wanted, she said. “For us to move on.”
Back in Narrows, she watched her three toddler grandkids — and remembered Jarrett at that age, remembered Jarrett bouncing the twins on his lap. That helped, too.

So did inviting Jarrett’s Tech friends to dinner and to church. Most of them were far away from their families, and Jarrett would want her to reach out to them, she knew.

“I don’t know how she did it,” recalled Erin Burress, one of Jarrett’s core group of Tech friends and now a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University. “She seemed to handle it better than most of us.”

Operating on faith

Her first Sunday back at church, Tim Cline was shocked when Tracey stood up to address the congregation and thank them for their support. She doesn’t remember now what she said.

But Cline does: “She reminded me a lot of a minister. She was sharing from her heart what the situation was like, what it will be — but yet knowing full well that Jarrett was with the Lord.

“She was giving everyone a sense of, ‘Yeah, you’ll be OK.’ ”

Just a week earlier, Jarrett’s old coaches, teachers and family friends had prepared Narrows High School for his visitation and funeral, which drew more than 1,000 people.

These were the people who had shielded her when the media turned up on her front lawn. The same folks who told the Chicago Tribune reporter: “I know you’re from a tough town, but it’s gonna be bad news if we find you hassling Tracey Lane.”

Knowing she was exhausted, they begged her not to stay at the visitation long. But she was there from the time they opened the doors until the last person came through the line — “the greatest show of strength I’ve ever seen from anyone,” Cline recalled.

By midsummer, she had plunged fully back into the church, helping out with the youth camps Jarrett had loved, participating in Sunday school skits, volunteering on committees.

Church friends introduced her to Mark and Joyce Bryant, the Giles County couple who had lost six of their nine children in a 2005 gas-leak explosion in Michigan. “I began to think, ‘Their faith has got to be so strong,’ ” Tracey said. “If they can do it, I know I’m going to have to.”

People were watching her, she knew. “To see if I would crack.”

Ruminating on Cho

In August, a church member’s husband drowned, and Tracey knew what she had to do. She went to her friend’s side immediately to comfort her and to share what had kept her going:

“I knew it wasn’t gonna be the food. It wasn’t gonna be the people who came to the house. And it wasn’t gonna be my family or myself.

“It was gonna be my faith.”

There are still days, of course, when all she can think about is: Why didn’t the university shut down after the first two students were killed? What would Jarrett be doing right now if they had?

When Virginia General Assembly committees voted down attempts to close the so-called “loophole” on background checks at gun shows, she was livid.

“I know Cho didn’t buy his gun at a gun show, but what about the next Cho? For the life of me, I can’t see why it’s a problem for somebody to have a background check.

“Talk about inconvenience? It’s an inconvenience for a parent to be .… told that your child has been shot and killed.”

While she hasn’t been as politically active as some other victims’ parents, she’s grateful for those who have and keeps up with them via e-mail. Through her lawyer, she joined a group of families who are considering suing the university. But it’s not something she wants to discuss publicly.

As April 16 draws near, she finds herself ruminating on Cho. As a Christian, she knows she’s supposed to forgive. “But I haven’t gotten to that point yet,” she said. “That may be why I’m thinking about him so much now.”

It’s hard to move on when she’s continually bombarded with memories of April 16 — the memorial ribbon on the car in front of her, strangers stopping her in Wal-Mart to offer condolences, more shootings in the news.

“It’s all been so much in front of me,” she says. “And then again, I don’t really want to move past it yet, either; I don’t want to forget Jarrett.

“It’s been almost a year now that I haven’t seen him. Every day it’s one more day that I haven’t seen him, and I know there are gonna be far more.”

Bridge to healing

When Jarrett was a child floating Cool Whip containers down Wolf Creek, he told his mom and sisters: “One day I’m going to build a bridge.”

The Giles County Board of Supervisors had no way of knowing that when its members decided to name a new bridge on the outskirts of town the Jarrett Lee Lane Memorial Bridge.

It’s a wide bridge, paved with concrete, fairly plain. It replaces an old bridge on Virginia 724, a winding, scenic road that Jarrett used to take when he was first learning to drive. “It’s a pretty area and a pretty creek, and it’s synonymous with Narrows,” Tracey said, standing on the bridge for the first time since it opened. “Jarrett was all over Wolf Creek.”

It was March 1, a brisk and windy day. Daffodils were starting to pop out near the banks of the creek.

“We’d tease him a lot, being the baby in the family,” she recalled. “We used to say to him, ‘Are you gonna call this bridge of yours the Jarrett Lane bridge?’ ”

Heading back toward town in Jarrett’s car, she passed Ragsdale Field, where Jarrett had worn his No. 24 football jersey so many times and given his valedictory speech. “He was really nervous,” she remembered. “He wore sunglasses to help calm him down.”

The Northern Illinois University shootings had happened just three weeks before, and Tracey had bought cards to send to families of those victims. She was holding off on sending them, though — even she didn’t know what to write.

“Sometimes words are just hollow,” she said. “You’re sorry, of course, and yes, it’s senseless. But I do want to lift them up in prayer.”

Renewed youth

That night, Tracey and her mother attended a Christian music concert at their church. The event was designed to appeal to area teens. Church leaders have noticed a surge in attendance among the teenagers since Jarrett’s death.

“It’s really affected them,” said Beverly Dent, a Sunday school teacher. “Even after Jarrett graduated, he used to come back and help us with retreats and be a counselor for the kids; they confided in him.”

Her 17-year-old son, Gage, treasures the text message Jarrett sent him the night before his death, encouraging him to follow his dream of playing college baseball.

“He’s still got that on his phone,” his mother said. He’s going to Concord College in the fall, and he hopes to play on the team.

Unlike most young adults who leave, “Jarrett was still so proud of Narrows,” added David Dent, a church deacon. “Without a doubt, he was the light of the whole town.

“And what’s amazing to me is, a year later, that’s still true. Some kids are coming to church now that I never dreamed I’d see here, and I think Jarrett has a lot to do with that.”

As the crowd settled in for the concert, Tracey and her mother took a seat near the back. The opening act was Craig Whittaker, a recording artist from nearby Pearisburg who often performs at the church.

At the end of his set, he sang “I’ve Seen Jesus,” the song he’d written for Jarrett’s funeral. It had taken him only 24 hours to compose the song, which is written from Jarrett’s perspective.

Whittaker was positive, he said when he introduced it at the funeral, “that somehow, some way, somebody was helping me write these words.”

Words cannot describe it, everything we learned is real

This place it is so beautiful, only love is what I feel

And I realize the reason for the smile He gave to me

Oh Mom, one day you’ll see…

…I’m with Jesus

And we’re holding your hand

Tracey had the song on a CD at home, but she hadn’t played it much, she said earlier. “It kinda makes me cry.”

But this night, in this church, she smiled as Whittaker sang, and she remembered Jarrett:

The son who promised to build a wing onto his house for her when she retired. (“Your wife might have other ideas,” she told him.)

The young man who still carried a football, Frisbee and basketball around in the trunk of his car — in case he happened upon a pickup game.

The friend who called a fellow student on her cellphone — just to cheer her up.

Jarrett was with Jesus, Tracey was sure of it.

When the song was over, she stood up and, with her mother and her church family surrounding her, she clapped with everything she had.