I had written an opinion piece on the destructive power of words, but now in the wake of the shootings at Virginia Tech, it all seems rather beside the point. I had said words can damage a person’s reputation, that they can constitute a kind of murder of the soul, and that we should be careful about how we speak. This, however, is not the time for metaphors.

I hear this morning that at least one of the people killed was a teacher. He was trying to block the door of a classroom into which the shooter was attempting to gain entry. The teacher was himself a Holocaust survivor. April 16th, ironically, was Holocaust Remembrance Day. If this is true, he certainly died a hero.

There will be other stories in the coming days. I’m already hearing about one student who was turning over chairs to try to impede the killer. These stories will be inspirational, but they won’t provide answers for us. We’re not even sure, at this point, if the shootings at either end of the campus were related, although it seems improbable to the vanishing point that they were not.

As a teacher, I would like to be able to provide some answers. I teach political theory, a subject which is noted for raising the big questions. I’m used to having people look at me as I ask hard questions to which there is no ready answer. I enjoy the play of ideas as people use parts of their mind that they don’t normally use in the daily activities of life. Today, however, I would like to be able to give you some answers, to explain all of this in a rational way. I would like to be able to give myself some answers.

I can’t. Suppose a random series of occurrences congealed in such a fashion that we could go back and trace their line of development. Even once we have all the facts straight, we still won’t be able to understand the meaning of these events because, after all is said and done, it just isn’t fair. It isn’t fair that a man could survive something as massively lethal and heartbreaking as the Holocaust only to lose his life in a case that may have no meaning outside of neuropathology. It isn’t fair that students should die whose only crime was to get up and go to class on a Monday morning.

When I’ve gone to funerals for people who died prematurely or unexpectedly, I have always been grateful to the priests or rabbis or whoever who did not try to teach us a lesson, to the ones who were honest enough to admit they don’t have all the answers, that in fact they didn’t have any of the answers. Explanation is no substitute for mourning. We mourn the loss of a life because life is good and because we can sympathize with those who lose someone they love. We know what this means because we, all of us, have someone we love, or whom we have loved.

The key is how to bear up under the loss. So I have no rational answers for you, no quotes from Aristotle or Plato or Mill to make it all make sense, but I do have the reality of experience. I remember at a certain age I used to think that if I lost certain people in my life, a father or a brother, that I couldn’t imagine how I would cope. All I can tell you is that I did. That after a while the dawn smelled sweet and the food tasted good again. If there is loss in life, there is also healing. It’s almost as if it’s embedded in our natures. I can’t explain it, but I have experienced it.

That said, there is also a time to mourn, a time to regret the loss and ask questions that we will ask repeatedly, knowing that not only do we not have the answers but that even if we had them, we wouldn’t feel any better, at least not for awhile. After I have suffered a grievous loss, over time I felt that I had a responsibility of some kind; that life is a tremendous gift or, at least a tremendous bit of good fortune, and that I should appreciate it. I owe them that much.

Roger White is a chairman and associate professor from the political science department.