"They are All Cherished"

I haven't commented on the shootings at Virginia Tech, and I wasn't going to do it here, as for the most part it's not all that relevant or appropriate to this site. But I found out tonight about a story, with a baseball connection, that brought the reality shootings home to me in an even more vivid and terrible way than the newscasts I've been watching about the tragedy.

I found out from Sam, who has an amazing post up on her MVN Tigers blog about Tigers fan and Virginia Tech victim Brian Bluhm, who was a top poster on Motownsports.com:

Brian was a fan. He was one of our fans. He loved the Tigers even from afar, loved them enough to want to talk about them all the time, think about them a lot, see what other people were thinking about them. He was a Curtis Granderson fan. He was intelligent and funny, and he knew so much about the Tigers that his opinions carried a lot of weight among many intelligent fans.

So now Brian’s friends and family are left to deal with his absence, and all our thoughts go out to them. And there are many more people, scattered all across the country and the world, who go about their business with a heavier heart, grieving for a member of a community we all belong to, even if we’ve never met.

She also linked to an article about Bluhm on detnews.com:

The Tigers chat-room family was worried Monday when word broke there had been mass shootings on the Blacksburg, Va., campus. Motownsports.com "posters" began flooding Bluhm with requests to report all was well.

Chichester left a message on Bluhm's dormitory phone.

When a man who might post a dozen or more submissions in a given day, particularly during baseball season, failed to respond, the concern turned to dread. By late Monday night, word had been received by way of the MySpace Web site niche occupied by his sister, Angela, that Brian was dead.

Which in turn linked to a touching tribute by Bluhm's favorite Tiger, Curtis Granderson:

One of the victims of the tragedy was 25-year-old Brian Bluhm. I never had the pleasure of actually meeting Brian. In just a few short weeks, Brian was scheduled to earn his Master's Degree in Civil Engineering from Virginia Tech. A bright future was in the works for this Detroit sports fan, who on his own web site admitted that he either works on his thesis or reads about the Tigers. Now that's what I call a broad range.

I will leave Brian in my top friends list as my small tribute to him. He deserves so much more than just a picture on a web page, though. You can read some excellent articles about Brian here:

DetroitTigers.com  |  Detroit News  |  Detroit Free Press  |  New York Times

There were 31 other innocent victims on Monday morning on Virginia Tech's campus. Some were teachers and administrators; some were students. They are all cherished.

Now, I'm not saying somehow that Bluhm's death somehow makes the tragedy more serious to me. I'm not saying he's the only one who should be remembered. But this story, because I could identify with the message-board community aspect as well as the baseball friends aspect, gave me a more vivid, awful sense of the tragedy. Feeling heartbroken over Brian Bluhm's death, ruminating on all the people whose lives he was a part of, made my next thought that much more devastating: Now multiply that 31 times.

A truly awful episode in the history of our country. More grief than can be calculated. More loss than we may ever fully realize.