Frigid winds whip the red and black cloths draped over the ends of the murals in the Martin Luther King Memorial Commons.
Yet the stream of visitors coming to look, or to leave messages, or to simply share in the experience, is not deterred.
What they discover is uplifting and heartbreaking and, ultimately, reassuring: We will get through this together – forward together.
There truly are too many condolences to read; they intersect one another in all sorts of colors produced by the numerous Sharpies made available. Some are in foreign languages. Some are passages from the Bible. Some are quotes from Gandhi.
“I wanted to see it,” says Joseph Verstynen, a graduate student in speech-language pathology. “Being a student here, it felt proper to come out and give my thoughts and respects. It’s very touching, very real. It’s unfortunate that it takes such a tragedy to get people to show such an outpouring of emotion, but it’s here. There’s a lot of goodness in people.”
Kimberly Johnson, supervisor of the supplemental instruction program in the ACCESS office, made her first trip to the murals Wednesday.
“Today felt right,” Johnson says. “There’s more time to read everyone’s thoughts, and to put mine up.”
She calls the memorials “moving” and “appropriate.”
“It shows the families of the students we lost that we’re backing them,” she says. “We support them in their time of need.”
- Mark McGowan, NIU Public Affairs