1BLACKSBURG -- One year later, the boxes remain untouched in Leslie Sherman's bedroom.

Inside is the clothing, bedding and books from the 20-year-old's life as a junior international studies and history major at Virginia Tech, sent home to Springfield shortly after her death on April 16, 2007.

Leslie's mother, Holly Adams Sherman, still can't bring herself to enter her daughter's room, to unpack the woefully little that was returned to her after Leslie's slaying and the slayings of 31 other students and faculty members at the hands of a mentally ill student.

"I still smell my daughter," the mother said, pausing.

"You know they're yours, from the moment you hold them."

Today in Blacksburg and throughout Virginia and beyond, thousands will come together in formal ceremonies and smaller gatherings to remember loved ones lost in the most deadly school shooting in U.S. history.

For the families of the Tech victims, the year has been defined by pain and struggle.

"We've been through all the firsts," said Bryan Cloyd, a Tech accounting professor whose 18-year-old daughter, Austin Michelle Cloyd, was one of the 27 students killed that day.

"The first birthday without her. The first Thanksgiving. The first Christmas."

Families have confronted the horrible truth of what happened at Norris Hall, where Seung-Hui Cho killed 30 of his 32 victims. With the building's doors chained shut, he fired 174 shots in 12 minutes.

They've learned of the mental-health problems and missed signals that led to Cho's homicidal rampage.

They've fought through grief to wring some good from the evil, lobbying for changes in laws governing mental health and campus security.

And they still face what may be the biggest challenge -- trying to survive daily life, to regain happiness, without their loved ones who were killed.

"For the last year, a lot of it has been learning how to be a family with a pretty big hole in it that's always going to be there," said Peter Read, the father of victim Mary Read, a 19-year-old freshman from Annandale.

For Sherman, 53, surviving the past year has been about staying busy, an attempt to stay one step ahead of the new reality of life without her daughter.

"I guess that April 16 created this shadow that is kind of there," she said recently. "It's this dark shadow -- and we realized, I realized, it was chasing me. And I thought, 'If I keep moving, it won't catch up with me.' But I'm so afraid of the day that I stop, and it does.

" . . . Half the battle now is the anticipating of that day."

. . .

Officials say Cho, armed with two weapons and more than 300 rounds of ammunition, randomly chose his victims and the locations where they were shot that chilly morning -- killing two students at the West Ambler Johnston Hall dormitory before he resurfaced at Norris Hall, where he killed 25 students and five faculty members and then shot himself as police closed in.

Twenty-five students were seriously wounded but survived the shootings.

Sherman and her family received the news about Leslie from local police at their home at 9 that night. She remembers a call from friends Ed and Joan Siira down the street and remembers telling them not to come over. They came anyway.

"I just remember sitting with my head buried in Joan's twill pants," she said.

It took almost 24 hours after the carnage for Cloyd and his wife, Renee -- frantic to find their daughter -- to learn the truth.

They were shown a photo of one of the bodies. Austin, a striking, 6-foot-tall redhead with fair skin, was wearing pearls the morning she died in the French class of Jocelyne Couture-Nowak.

"I experienced emotions I've never experienced before," said Bryan Cloyd, 47. "There were deep periods of sorrow. There were periods of extreme sadness. I was probably clinically depressed."

Austin, the older of the Cloyds' two children, was an advocate for the poor. She spent four summers with the Appalachian Service Project, helping renovate homes of the needy in far Southwest Virginia and Kentucky. She was a dean's list student in Tech's honors program.

"Back in April, I asked, 'Is God there? Is he on my side? Is he on Austin's side? Or is he not there at all?'" said Cloyd, speaking precisely and with intensity. "'Is God all-powerful?'"

. . .

Faith was not the only thing being questioned by the victims' families. As details of the attacks emerged, people began to challenge Virginia Tech's handling of Cho given his history of mental instability.

They also questioned the university's initial response to the first two murders -- the dormitory killings of students Emily Hilscher and Ryan Clark -- and the two-hour delay in notifying the campus about the shootings.

There also were questions of law, regarding how Cho was able to obtain the weapons he used in the attacks given his mental-health history. And, they wondered, where was the oversight, a way to follow up on a court's order that Cho receive mental-health treatment?

A number of the families channeled their grief into action during the 2008 General Assembly session, coming to Richmond to advocate for changes in the state's mental-health and gun laws. For weeks, they testified passionately, held news conferences, and met with the governor and anyone else who would listen.

"If you ask the families of the victims of April 16 what the main issues they have been and are still dealing with, other than their grief for the loss of their children and professors, and the suffering of those injured, they would highlight truth, accountability, apology," said Joseph T. Samaha, the father of victim Reema Samaha, 18, of Centreville.

"And to make certain that the tangible issues known to us are corrected and there be follow-up and implementation by the commonwealth."

. . .

The families got much of what they'd wanted in terms of changes in mental-health policy, but they suffered setbacks in their attempts to further restrict the purchase of firearms. The progress, however, has not necessarily brought them peace.

A number of victims' families still have trouble speaking about what happened. Not all will make the trip to Blacksburg today for the anniversary.

"I'm just too upset," said Lynette Alameddine of Saugus, Mass., whose son, Ross, was a 20-year-old sophomore at Tech. "I can't say anything. I can't talk about it."

"A lot of parents are still very, very angry," Sherman said. She said she was among them and that she felt a particular anger toward Tech President Charles W. Steger in the first few months after the shootings.

"I think I wanted to blame somebody with a face," she said.

A dinner meeting was arranged near the Shermans' home with Steger and Jay Poole from the university's Office of Recovery and Support.

"I saw their tears," Sherman said. "And we hugged and hugged and it faded away. My anger was converted. I think they hurt as much as they could hurt."

Cloyd read a lot of books on theology and religion after his daughter's death, including some by C.S. Lewis.

"I'm not sure I ever totally lost my faith," Cloyd said. "I thought my way out of it at one point. Then I had to think my way back into it.

"Austin's death caused me to rediscover faith," he said. "God's there, but people have free will. God doesn't interfere no matter the consequences."

. . .

The randomness of who died and who survived the gunfire a year ago is something Allison Cook carries with her every day, like the bullets from Cho's guns that still are lodged in her body.

Cook, who grew up in western Henrico County and returned to Tech this year as a sophomore, survived being shot three times by Cho in the same French class in which Cloyd, Sherman, Read and eight others were killed.

On cold or rainy days, Cook can feel the bullet that is lodged in her right shoulder. Doctors decided to leave the bullet in place because it was not medically necessary to remove. Another bullet remains lodged under her collarbone.

But a year later, she is perhaps more challenged by her emotional wounds -- a hurt she sees in classmates on campus, even those who suffered no physical injury during the attacks.

"We're all kind of grieving and mourning," she said last week. "We're still healing as a campus, and as the anniversary approaches, things are becoming more anxious and on edge."

For Cook, it's still hard being in a classroom. It took awhile to get used to walking past Norris Hall. Several weeks ago, she entered the building again, accompanied by her parents, with whom she shared more details of the attacks.

Cook has found comfort from another classmate who also was shot that day and survived, fellow western Henrico resident Emily Haas.

The women are sorority sisters. Each month, they gather with other students injured that day and have dinner at Poole's home.

Cook said that while she felt disconnected from campus life when she returned to Tech last fall, she's glad she came back.

"I want to be here," she said. "I want to stay here."

She believes what happened at Tech can happen anywhere, citing the shootings this winter at Northern Illinois University.

But that doesn't keep Cook and others from wondering why it had to happen at Tech. Why at Norris Hall? Why in her classroom?

"I don't think I'll ever know," she said.

. . .

Unanswered questions seem destined to remain part of the legacy of the Tech shootings long after today's ceremonies end.

But for some families, the tragedy also has brought an undeniable clarity and purpose to their lives.

A renewal of faith. A change in the law. Not waiting to say, "I love you."

Cloyd remembers how Austin surprised him last year by decorating his office door with balloons for his birthday. Three weeks later, she was gone.

Now, he's thinking about where he should leave her ashes, perhaps in the ocean off the coast of Australia, where he and Austin had gone scuba diving on vacation.

"My priorities prior to that morning went out the window," Cloyd said. "Like career advancement and retirement savings. Those sorts of things don't matter to me now. There's a new set of priorities. Being compassionate is more important."

"You have to go through extreme darkness to see certain truths," he said.

Peter Read and his wife, Cathy, just celebrated the birth of a baby boy, Kevin. The infant will accompany them to Tech today for the ceremony honoring Mary Read and the other victims.

"It's something very life-affirming -- we know Mary would have been very happy about it," said Peter, a retired Air Force officer.

"It helps us understand about the need for life to go on, to focus more on the present. It's important to remember the past and think about the future, but where you are is here, and now."

Cathy will take the purse she recovered from her stepdaughter's dormitory almost a year ago. She carries it everywhere.

The Sherman family also will be at Virginia Tech today. Last year, Leslie's younger sister, Lisa, learned from Tech that she had been accepted as a transfer student from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Word came two weeks before the shootings, and the women were excited about spending the rest of their college years together.

Lisa has been at Tech since the fall. Leslie is there in spirit, memorialized on one of 32 stones placed in a graceful arc on the western edge of the Drillfield, part of the school's permanent remembrance of the massacre.

"After this year, she'll feel less in the shadow of her sister, and Tech will belong to her," Holly Sherman said.

"It's been a year of hell, and I think April 17 is going to be the beginning of the second chapter, and probably easier on us," she added.

"Maybe there will be some May flowers to remind us of life. Maybe we won't cry as hard when we see the stories next year. I want to put a period at the end of this year."

Perhaps, Sherman said, she finally will enter Leslie's bedroom -- inhabited for nearly a year only by boxes and Leslie's dog Winnie, who sleeps on the bed every night.

"I don't know if 'forgiveness' is the word, but we understand it wasn't any particular person's fault but the shooter's, who robbed us and our child of the one thing he couldn't have -- happiness," she said.

"He didn't know the meaning of the word, but he certainly knew how to take it away from our children and our families, and I'm not going to let him take it away anymore."

Contact Jim Nolan at (804) 649-6061 or jnolan@timesdispatch.com.

Contact Carlos Santos at (434) 295-9542 or csantos@timesdispatch.com.