Heather had decided to amputate her left leg below the knee. In the end, after long consultation with doctors, and with people who had faced the same choice, she had felt surprising clarity. The pain she had fought all week was almost unbearable. Living the rest of her life that way, in discomfort and on medication, was not something she was willing to accept. Neither was the likelihood that she would be unable to walk normally, or run. If she kept her mangled foot, doctors told her, it would never look the same. With a prosthetic leg, she could look almost like herself. Heather knew she had to be honest about what mattered to her. She wanted to live an active life; she wanted to look healthy and normal and attractive. If she couldn’t do those things, could she be happy?
Her friend Jason had been with her the night before, on Sunday, when a nurse came to mark her left leg for the surgery. The below-the-knee amputation meant her loss would be easier to cope with than those of some other victims, whose legs had been amputated higher up. To give her a full range of prosthetic options, though, doctors would take some healthy tissue, higher up on Heather’s leg, as well as her devastated foot. She could have opted to lose just the foot, but her doctors and other amputees explained that the highest-tech, most lifelike new prosthetics—those that would allow her the greatest range of motion and activity—were designed to replace the foot, ankle, and lower leg. As more advanced prosthetics were developed, some amputees who had lost a foot were even opting to go back to surgery and give up part of their leg, in order to gain a higher quality of life. Heather didn’t want to go only halfway and then regret it. But the thought of her losing more than just the foot pained Jason; he had struggled, from the start, with the thought of any kind of amputation. Heather tried to reassure him that the choice was for the best, and that she had made her peace with it.
After he had gone and she was alone in her hospital bed, the finality of what was coming hit her with full force. Heather was almost always collected and rational, strikingly so. The young doctor who had taken her into surgery the night of the bombing told her later he had never seen a patient stay so calm with injuries so severe. But the week had been cruel. The rising hope of its early days—when it had looked like her foot could be saved—had collapsed. In the nighttime quiet of the hospital, Heather broke down and cried.
• • •
Medford was the city where he’d grown up, the city where he’d learned to love running and launched his career in race management. Dave McGillivray had returned many times since. But never for something like this. It was Sunday evening, six days after the marathon bombing. Krystle Campbell’s parents were holding their daughter’s wake at Dello Russo Funeral Home on Main Street. McGillivray had grown up with the Dello Russos. When McGillivray’s father died a few years earlier, the family had held his wake there. It was surreal to be back on this day, for this reason, but he knew he needed to make an appearance. With his presence, the marathon itself was sharing the family’s grief. McGillivray planned to meet a couple of colleagues from the Boston Athletic Association at the funeral home. One was Amy Dominici, a consultant who’d worked on the race for years. McGillivray called Dominici when he arrived, asking where she was. She told him she was already in the line, which snaked down the block and all the way around a corner. McGillivray parked his car and went to find her. When he did, he couldn’t believe where they were standing. It was the street where he’d lived as a young boy. His childhood home, the two-family his grandfather had built, with the basement playroom his father had added for the kids, stood only a few houses away.
The line moved glacially. Dominici went to the front to see if they could get in quickly ahead of the others. McGillivray hated to cut lines, but he wasn’t wild about spending two or three hours waiting, either. The funeral director then ushered Dominici, McGillivray, and Tom Grilk, the executive director of the BAA, inside. In a room near the entrance, photos from Krystle’s life were arrayed on poster board—Krystle in a New England Patriots jersey; at Fenway Park; in a wedding party on a beach. In nearly every shot, her signature smile radiated. McGillivray was nervous about meeting her family. He didn’t know what to say. He let Dominici take the lead.
“We’re all here from the BAA,” she told Krystle’s mother, Patty.
“I’m sorry,” Patty said, “I don’t know what that is.”
It was a humbling moment for McGillivray. He realized how much bigger than the Boston Marathon this was. He grew uneasy, wondering if Krystle’s family would hold him responsible somehow. All of this had happened at his race, after all. Without the marathon, there would have been no bombs. Their daughter would still be alive.
Dominici explained that the BAA was the organization that staged the marathon.
“Oh, how nice of you to come,” Patty said, and then she and Dominici shared a laugh about how young Patty looked. McGillivray was relieved. It had gone okay. Dominici had successfully broken the ice, and he had paid his respects. They left soon after.
With hundreds of mourners still in line, Dello Russo had to keep its doors open beyond the four hours set aside for the wake. One of those waiting, Melanie Fitzemeyer, thirty-nine, was a former babysitter of Krystle’s. The skin on her forearm was still pink from the tattoo of Krystle’s name she’d had inked into her flesh the night before. “I’m here because my heart hurts,” said another woman in the line, Barbara Moynihan, fifty-six, who had gone to school with Krystle’s father. “I have two daughters, and if I lost one of my daughters—there are just no words.” When the sun set, the wait to get into the funeral home grew windy and cold. Few, if any, gave up. As the first wake or funeral for any of the Marathon Week victims, the night had become a vessel for public grief, the first opportunity to shake a hand, give a hug, offer words of condolence. For hours, Patty and her family gamely received the goodwill, much of it from perfect strangers. Krystle, they understood, was a symbol of a city’s sorrow, but she was more than that to them. She was a daughter, a granddaughter, a sister, a niece.
The next morning, under a bright blue sky, hundreds of friends, family, neighbors, well-wishers from Medford, and dignitaries packed into St. Joseph Church in the center of the city to bid Krystle good-bye. About two hundred people were still waiting to get in when the church hit capacity. Police and spectators lined High Street. An honor detail of firefighters formed a corridor leading up to the church doors, snapping to attention and saluting as pallbearers passed with the casket. A solitary church bell tolled as the crowd fell silent. When the service was over, the pallbearers carried Krystle’s casket back outside and into a waiting hearse. Krystle’s mom, dad, and brother walked out behind it, her seventy-nine-year-old nana, Lillian, whom she had nursed through ill health, following closely behind.
The funeral procession journeyed a mile or so up the road to Medford’s Oak Grove Cemetery, the place where, as it happened, Dave McGillivray had mowed the grass as a kid. There, too, not everyone could fit, so they cut off the flow of cars. At first, before Krystle’s family got there, mourners stayed back from the grave. When the family arrived, the crowd filled in around them. A hush fell over the gathering. “Our citizenship is in heaven,” said the Reverend Chip Hines, the pastor of St. Joseph Church, reading from the Letter of Saint Paul to the Philippians. In the months ahead, Krystle’s final resting place would be marked with a reddish gravestone bearing her photograph within the outline of a heart. It would blossom with red, pink, and orange flowers, a faded blue Red Sox cap, an angel figurine with shamrocks. On this day, a week after her death, her friends had trouble leaving her for the last time. Krystle had always surrounded herself with people. She had loved good company more than anything. She had been a devoted confidante, a beloved coworker, a big piece of everyone’s sunshine. But her friends also knew that Krystle would want them to move on, to seize the promise of their own lives. As her friend Tim Getchell later explained, “She’d kick our asses if we just sat around and cried.”
• • •
The scale of the undertaking was unprecedented. A typical stress-inducing “critical incident”—a shooting or the death of a child, for example—might involve half a dozen officers out of a force of two thousand. They would gather for a single session to talk about it. Fleming’s team normally ran two or three such meetings a month, including some for members of police departments elsewhere. When the list of marathon responders was finished, it included 650 people. It would take nine days and fifty-seven sessions to reach them all. Some of the discussions lasted two hours; others stretched to five or six. Sitting together in classrooms at a union training center, they reviewed what had happened when the bombs went off, filling in the blank spots for one another. They discussed their own reactions. They learned about the most likely symptoms of stress—anxiety, insomnia, tics—and how to handle them in a healthy way, without becoming isolated or obsessed. “We try to get it out so they don’t bury it,” Fleming said.
The discussions were led by a special team of forty BPD officers, who worked regular police shifts but were also trained to help their peers. In addition, the New York City Police Department sent eighteen retired and active officers, all similarly trained, to assist. The added manpower was appreciated, and so was the message that their presence sent. If anyone came in thinking the meetings were overkill or a needless formality, the sight of the NYPD changed their attitude. “Then they knew it was serious business,” said Fleming. “No one has the experience they did.” When the New York officers talked about how 9/11 affected them, it gave the Boston officers permission to open up.
Everything that happened in the rooms was confidential. Still, the push for honesty was an uphill battle. “Cops don’t want to bare their souls,” said Fleming. Despite the heavy emphasis on protecting privacy, some worried that something they said would leak out. Some were afraid of being seen as weak, in a job where strength was everything. I’m okay, I’m fine was their default position. Sometimes Fleming thought “fine” ought to be a red flag. So his team kept at it for weeks and months, chipping away at the resistance over time, making phone calls and meeting people for coffee. After the mandatory sessions were over, as he kept making the rounds, he sometimes found a cop he thought should go for counseling. Just try it once, he would suggest. If you don’t like it, okay. Months later, in the fall, there would be calls from officers who had just begun to connect their symptoms to the bombing. The calls could keep trickling in for years.
The events at the marathon finish line had been tough for everyone, veterans and rookies alike, but the more experienced responders at least had previous experience with trauma. There had been a lot of young officers at the finish line that day; some of them saw their first dead body on Boylston Street. After it was over, the youngest, greenest cops were the ones most likely to rush back to work. They were eager to prove they could handle it: to show the world that they were fine, whatever they had seen.
• • •
Shana Cottone knew she needed some time off. On Saturday, the day after the dramatic capture in Watertown, she packed up her car and her pet beagle, Monkey, and headed south to New York, where she had grown up. She had yet to make sense of what had happened at the finish line. She badly needed a change of scenery and a few days away from TV. When she drove onto the ferry that would take her to Long Island, it was clear to her how much the week had seeped into her head. She was anxious the moment she got on the boat, hypervigilant in a way she had never been before on this easy homeward trip across the water.
Working her regular beat in East Boston the previous day, Shana had been riveted by the manhunt. She flipped on the radio while driving to work at 5:30 A.M. and discovered what had happened overnight. The death of Sean Collier hit her hard. That could have been any one of us, she thought. Two of her friends lived in the zone that was locked down; imagining how nervous they must be, she called one of them to offer reassurance. She sent a text message to a fellow police officer, a good friend, to remind him to wear his bulletproof vest. All week she had been waiting for something to happen. Even as the door-to-door searches dragged on all day, Shana felt in her gut that some resolution was coming. She had promised Roseann and her family that the bombers would be captured, and she felt a personal responsibility. At one point she stepped into a bar on her beat to check for the latest updates on TV. Later, she heard some other police officers discussing possible outcomes; one said the cops should kill the suspect when they found him. Shana could not resist interrupting. “Keep your opinion to yourself,” she said sharply. “Some people want to see him tried in court.” When police finally surrounded Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on the boat, Shana’s adrenaline surged. She watched the standoff on the TV in the lunchroom at the station, jumping around like a kid in her excitement, sending updates via text message to Roseann’s sister. She felt almost giddy with relief when it was over.
The next morning, though, the giddiness was gone, and the weight of the week resettled on her shoulders. She just wanted to get out of Boston and see her dad. The phone call she had made to him from the van right after the bombing had been one of the worst moments of her life; she believed then that she might never see him again. It was strange and sad to think how abruptly things had changed: When Shana first moved to Boston from New York, not long after 9/11, it had been her new city that felt safe. Now a shadow lay over both places. She hoped when she got to Long Island, she could stop thinking about Monday. Her mind kept traveling back to those minutes in the street. As she drove south, she kept picturing the victims. She wondered when the memory would fade. It would not be soon, she was sure of that.
• • •
At Boston Medical Center, Celeste Corcoran was one week ahead of Heather. The mother of two had lost both her legs in the bombing, and now, as the haze of medication lifted, the reality of her situation was settling in. It was impossible for her to see how her life could ever be normal. On Sunday, as Heather was summoning her resolve and counting down the hours until surgeons would take her leg, Celeste was in tears in her hospital bed. She wiped her eyes with tissues, clutching her daughter’s hand, as a marine with two prosthetic legs stood before her. Hospital monitors beeped in the background as he spoke with clear conviction, on a mission to convince her she would walk again.
“I can’t do anything right now,” Celeste said, her voice shaking.
“Right now, yes,” the young man allowed. “But I’m telling you with all my heart, you are going to be more independent than you ever were. . . . This isn’t the end, this is the beginning.”
None of the amputees could know what was coming. Everything was still ahead of them, and some of it would be unimaginably painful. In the lull before the months of hard work started, visitors like these marines delivered motivation. “We knew that everyone had had a very rough week, and we knew that these guys would walk in and just give them hope,” said Karen Guenther, president of the Semper Fi Fund, the nonprofit group that sent the marines, Gabe Martinez and Cameron West, to visit amputees at f
our Boston hospitals that weekend.
The city and the nation, also craving reassurance, seized upon the hope the visit offered to the Corcorans. A video of the bedside interaction, uploaded to YouTube by a relative and then posted on Celeste’s Facebook page, was viewed more than 100,000 times in less than two days. Progress, one day at a time, her cousin wrote online. All the amputees—sixteen in total, all of them now missing one or both legs—would work toward the same milestones. One by one, they would leave the hospitals where the ambulances had first taken them. They would move to Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Boston, a gleaming new facility on the waterfront near historic Bunker Hill. There they would be fitted with their first prosthetic legs, and then, over grueling weeks of therapy, learn to stand up, balance without crutches, and to walk. They would learn how to get out of bed, how to shower, and how to care for the remaining portions of their truncated limbs. Some would be haunted by “phantom pain” that seemed to come from the leg that was gone, a phenomenon poorly understood and hard to treat. Doctors would try to strike a delicate balance in managing pain, blocking it enough for them to start rehabilitation, while keeping the fog of the narcotics from getting in their way. Some who had lost one leg to amputation were left with a remaining leg that was badly damaged. The “good” leg could slow their progress, and in the most serious cases, the threat that they could face a second amputation lingered. The last patient to remain at Spaulding, Marc Fucarile—the man Shana had escorted to Mass General in the police van—would not go home until late July, one hundred days after the bombing.
Long Mile Home: Boston Under Attack, the City's Courageous Recovery, and the Epic Hunt for Justice Page 24