Grief, guilt, and the journey to self-acceptance after Virginia Tech

In August 2008, I was in a taxi in New York City with my cousin. I fixated on the lights flashing by us, for they all stood between me and a burst of tears. After a fun night, my cousin had finally gathered the courage to ask about what had happened 16 months prior. I finally composed myself enough to answer.

I told her about Virginia Tech, my undergrad university, in a small town serving a massive student population. A well-known school for a handful of disciplines, my interests weren't readily met as an aspiring globetrotter. I spent time transforming a small student organization into an international affairs powerhouse—at least, that's the narrative I had concocted in my 22-year-old brain.

I took my responsibility as president of that student organization seriously. On April 16, 2007, I awoke like a zombie, staying up until 3 AM the night before to close out a few of our projects before graduation. I drove to campus in a haze, primarily concerned with arriving just in time to buy my favorite blueberry muffin from our student commons. Those muffins were my brain food to fuel me through yet another long day.

I realized something was wrong when I pulled into my usual parking lot on campus.

In the distance, I spotted four or five ambulances with their lights rapidly spinning. Seconds later, I saw the EMTs. I'll never forget the look on their faces. I had never seen people look so devastated. Over the next few hours, our campus would hear the news. A lone shooter who had legally purchased several guns nearby killed 32 people and injured 17 others. Because the shooter had targeted a French language and an engineering class, many victims were in my orbit of international affairs and tech. Among them were beloved members of that student organization I ran.

I considered all three of them friends.

It's hard to describe the flurry of events that follow such a tragedy. To its credit, the Virginia Tech campus supported each other in a way I had never seen before. Being in a tiny town finally revealed its advantages, for no one in a 30-mile radius was confused if someone broke down and cried unprompted. With so many victims, everything and everywhere could be a trigger to someone, which everyone seemed to embrace.

I stepped up as best I could by supporting those in my organization who needed a friend. Whether we met for lunch or went to one of our fallen members' funerals, it was important to be there for them. The outpouring of support from each other and our extended communities was priceless. I wouldn't have gotten through without that support. Yet, in that period, I struggled with my darkest feelings: guilt and loneliness.

As a gay woman of color, my years at Virginia Tech were already challenging. My intersectional identity and existential ponderings left me secluded. The student group I ran had been one of my solaces. In fact, out of the dozen or so people to whom I was out on campus, two were killed in the shooting.

For years, guilt about not fitting in and loving my "college experience" plagued me. My fellow student group members cared about the world like I did but still loved their life at Virginia Tech. Some of them were queer themselves. So why was I so unhappy? I had constantly thought about this question before the shooting, even occasionally indulging in thoughts of dying young. In that way, the pain would lessen, and everyone would mourn the person I could have been. "It's so tragic she left us too soon," I imagined people would say.

Now, there I was, attending the funerals of friends who died young. Why did they die, and I survived? I kept asking myself. In hindsight, I understood that mass shootings aren't fair to anyone involved. It wasn’t helpful to wonder why they had died, and I lived.

At times, the guilt was overwhelming.

The first time I grasped my loneliness following the shooting was with my cousin that hot August night. In the following years, I would learn in my career in international development that a deep sadness comes with not being able to outwardly express your love and build intimacy in socially conservative environments. I spent more time with friends than I had all semester. My parents drove nearly five hours to pick me up when someone called a bomb threat into a campus building.

I was loved and appreciated. I knew that. I still felt lonely.

As the years passed, I felt the only way to make peace with what had happened was to love life unabashedly. I tried desperately, and to my relief, I did in some cases. In other instances, I covered my sadness. It didn't matter if there was stress about coming out to my parents or navigating a catastrophic recession after finishing grad school. I refused to fret about landing myself in yet another toxic relationship or about working abroad in a country that criminalized homosexuality.

I was supposed to love life because I was lucky to be alive.

On the 10th anniversary of the shooting, I found myself at the house of a victim I had known the best. Her parents had invited me and another friend in that same student organization for dinner. That night, her mother said something to me that I will never forget: we were victims, too.

Just because we weren’t in those classrooms didn't mean we were lucky. It didn't mean we weren't victims. I needed to hear it from someone with the profound right to convey its impact.

My wife and I found each other on Tinder in Ghana in 2017. I don't think it was a coincidence that I met her months after that shooting anniversary conversation. I needed permission to admit that I was a victim before I could fall in love with someone who empathized with such heavy emotional baggage. Meeting each other was lucky. Holding on to each other required sheer determination.

With the life my wife and I have built up, I found the strength to contextualize what happened in that shooting on a much deeper level. Decades later, I finally feel as though my queer identity and what happened in 2007 don’t stand in opposition. I no longer feel guilty or lonely. And that makes me grateful to be alive.

Mala Kumar is the author of the 2014 novel The Paths of Marriage.What it Meant to Surviveis her second novel from Bywater Books, published in October 2024. In her professional life, Mala is a global leader in tech for social good. She has worked extensively for the United Nations and at GitHub, a Microsoft-owned software company. Mala lives in New York City with her wife.

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