Boston Strong

by Casey Sherman

  Something else that gets her somewhat discouraged is the pain she gets in her limb from standing on it for long periods of time at parties and social events — she can only remain standing for an hour or so at a time before she needs to sit down. It’s frustrating for her and reminds her of what her life used to be like.

  She is making progress on getting rid of her limp, with the help of the physical therapists at Spaulding. But she’s self-conscious about a huge scar on her right leg, which is a reminder of the surgery that removed the vein in the attempt to save her foot.

  Her mother stayed with her at her apartment for two months after she was released from the hospital, but Heather has since learned to live on her own again. At first, a simple task like bringing in groceries was a burden. Because her balance was off, she’d have to put the bags down to walk up the three steps to her front door.

  Over time, her balance has improved, and she’s now able to carry bags up the stairs. Small victories.

  Before the bombings, she never worried about how far she might have to walk when she was making plans. But these days, it’s the first thing on her mind. She’ll sometimes plan her day based solely on how many steps might be involved. It’s an annoying reality of being an amputee, but one that she hopes will one day stop being an issue as she gets more agile on her prosthetics.

  “There are a lot of good things that have happened as a result of this, so I try to focus on those,” she says.

  She spends a lot of time with survivors Roseann Sdoia, Celeste Corcoran, and Jessica Downes. Jessica, a California native, and her husband, Patrick, a Boston College graduate, both sustained severe leg injuries in the bombing and each had a leg amputated below the knee.

  Heather loves bonding with the women as they share intimate stories of their recoveries and vent their fears and frustrations. It’s a group none of them ever wanted to be a part of, but here they are. And they’re more than thankful to have each other.

  “We’re not all in the same place emotionally,” Heather says. “One of my friends is very angry. She’s like, ‘My career has been taken away from me. Months of my life. I wanted to have children.’ She’s angry about it. I don’t feel like that. I can still do my job. I wasn’t planning to have a family. Maybe I would be more angry if it impacted my life more.”

  While many of those injured or maimed in the bombings have spouses or are in relationships that offer support, for Heather, it’s been a stiff challenge to overcome her adversity on her own. She’s also frustrated that she’ll forever have to address the issue of her prosthetic leg with new people she meets.

  “I have this whole new thing now that I have to explain,” she says. “I don’t know how to do that. I’m doing as much as I can to make it not an obvious thing. But there’s going to be a point where I have to explain it.”

  She went back to work part-time at Raytheon in August 2013. Walking in the first day was overwhelming as she was welcomed back with hugs, cards, balloons, and gifts.

  Heather works with 1,200 people and since she’s been back, it seems every day one of those people wants to give her a hug, chat about how she’s doing, or offer her some sort of help. She appreciates the outreach and support, but says sometimes it can be emotional. Other times, it can be an annoying reminder of the bombing when she’s just trying to coast through a casual workday.

  “It’s weird to be walking down the hall to make a copy or do something normal and have people stop you,” she says. “People mean well … but sometimes you just want to go to the bathroom or go back to your desk.”

  The post-bombing experience has been a whirlwind, to say the least. She met Michelle Obama a second time — at the First Lady’s personal request — at a political fundraiser in Boston. She was on the cover of People magazine, along with Adrienne Haslet-Davis and Mery Daniel.

  Mery Daniel spent six weeks in the hospital and at the Spaulding Rehabilitation Center. She had lost her left leg entirely, and she’d undergone countless surgeries to repair her right leg, the calf of which had been ripped off. She had only seen her daughter, Ciarra, three times since the bombing. She thought back to her own childhood, and the image came to mind of herself as a little girl wrapping duct tape around the legs of her dolls. She had always wanted to be a healer, and now she was forced to heal herself. Mery’s medical board exams would have to wait until she was strong enough, both physically and mentally, to begin studying again.

  And she still had miles to go in her recovery. As an amputee, she had received about $750,000 from the One Fund, but that money could only take her so far. Mery was facing a lifetime of medical treatments, a lifetime of new prosthetics. Other survivors had established personal crowdfunding charities, and Mery and her family eventually went that route, although fundraising was slow at first. By late May 2013, she had only raised a paltry sixteen thousand dollars to aid her recovery. Her pain was still fresh both from the wounds that were plain to see as well as from the psychological trauma caused by the bombing, which she relived every day in her mind. She suffered from phantom pains and a constant burning and itching feeling on the toes of her left foot that was no longer there. The rehabilitation itself was grueling, also — three hours of exercise each day that wore out her petite body. Yet Mery was determined to walk again, to live again. A month after the bombings, prosthetists created a plaster mold where her knee had once been on her left leg. The next step was to fit her with an artificial leg. United Prosthetics in Dorchester worked with Mery and helped her adjust to the device, which allowed her to stand for the first time since April 15 — but she still walked funny. Baby steps, she told herself.

  Soon her support system began to grow. In June, students at the William Seach Primary School in Weymouth, where Mery’s father, Hary, drives a bus, organized a walkathon that raised another eight thousand dollars for her recovery.75 The money allowed Mery and her husband, Richardson, to move into a new apartment in the South End, a first-floor unit that would be more manageable for her. She eventually returned to Boylston Street, to the exact spot where she almost lost her life — but also where she was reborn. Wearing a Boston Strong T-shirt, Mery found herself surrounded by well-wishers cheering her on. She was “Mery Strong.”

  By early fall, she was doing something she had never done before — she was training to ride as a member of the Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital team during the local leg of a Massachusetts-to-Philadelphia charity cycling event. She took spin classes, which she loved, pedaling slowly but with great determination to the beat of eclectic African music — her favorite. Mery’s strong will amazed everyone, even her caregivers.

  “She just leaps. She’s got the attitude ‘Never say die. Never tell me I can’t,’” said Mary Patstone, Director of Adaptive Sports for the Spaulding Rehabilitation Network.76

  Using a hand-powered bike and every muscle in her strong upper body, Mery pedaled and pushed herself along the twenty-eight-mile course, completing the ride with her teammates. Everyday people and superstar athletes fed off the strength of this resilient marathon survivor. Mery was honored by the New England Patriots before a home game, and even took advantage of an opportunity to throw out the first pitch at Fenway Park to her Red Sox hero, David Ortiz.

  As she tossed the ball from her wheelchair, the center field scoreboard lit up with a personal quote from Mery Daniel that read, “How we all came together that day, that’s what’s important to me. Not the evil part of it, but the best of us.”

  Following the marathon tragedy, the Boston Red Sox also discovered the best in themselves.

  It had been a miserable two years for the Sox and their loyal fan base. They had one of their worst seasons on record in 2012, marked by the infamous chicken and beer scandal. Bloated, prima donna pitchers like Josh Beckett became the symbol of a team that had lost its Everyman soul. Whereas the Sox in their mid-2000s World Series glory years had become famous for being a rogue band of knuckleheads who employed a hokey cowboy-up, never-give-up mentality, this batch of
pampered superstars were failures and grotesque underachievers who not only crushed high expectations, but did so while brazenly admitting to scarfing down Popeye’s fried chicken and swilling Bud Lite in the clubhouse during games. It was the antithesis of what Boston fans expected and demanded from their teams. It was the type of selfish behavior that the media, management, and all of Boston baseball fandom had always despised and railed against.

  The damage done to the Sox brand by the chicken and beer crew was deep. The Red Sox’s league-record run of sellout games came grinding to a halt as fans became disgusted with the product, on the field and off. Manager Bobby Valentine was the steward of a disgruntled, uninspired group of quitters who stood in stark contrast to the teams that won titles in 2004 and 2007. The 2012 Red Sox finished 69–93 — last in the American League East and the third worst record in the whole A.L. It was the team’s first losing record in 15 years, its worst finish since 1965, and the first time the team had lost 90 games since LBJ was in office.

  When the Sox took the field on the morning of April 15, 2013, they were a rag-tag bunch of rookies, cast-offs, and journeymen, with a few fading stars and quality holdovers from the World Series teams sprinkled in. They would soon grow into a bearded, brawny, gritty team that the city was once again proud of. The franchise’s phoenix-like rise from the ashes began on Marathon Monday morning and unfolded daily over the subsequent weeks like a welcome diversion — and dose of inspiration — as the entire city of Boston rose from the depths of despair that followed the horrific bombings. Nothing could take away the pain of the tragedy at the finish line, but the Sox at least offered people something positive to think about as the city sought to begin the healing process.

  It wasn’t the first time Boston had turned its eyes to sports in the wake of dire tragedy. In 2001, after two planes left out of Boston’s Logan International Airport and crashed into the World Trade Center, killing nearly three thousand people and changing our world forever, many in New England became enraptured with a handsome, young, unknown quarterback from San Mateo, California named Tom Brady, who was a welcome distraction from the painful realities of terrorism. Most of the passengers on those flights hailed from Boston, including former Bruins great Garnet “Ace” Bailey, who won two Stanley Cups with Bobby Orr and company in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and Boston University hockey star Mark Bavis. Most in New England knew someone, or knew someone who knew someone, who was on one of the planes or was in one of the Twin Towers. The wounds were deep and personal.

  So when Tom Brady and his crew of underdogs went into New Orleans just a few months after the 9/11 attacks and upset the “Greatest Show on Turf” — Kurt Warner’s high-scoring St. Louis Rams — in Super Bowl XXXVI, it provided a brief respite from the trauma and gave many a much-needed inspirational lift, if only for a moment. The fact that they were “the Patriots” was not lost on anyone. When accepting the Vince Lombardi Trophy in the Super Dome after Brady had orchestrated a miraculous last-minute victory, the team’s venerable owner, Robert Kraft, famously referenced the attacks and the nation’s grief and said, “Today, we are all Patriots.”

  By 2013, fears of terrorism, while never absent in Boston, had somewhat dissipated. And on the gorgeous, sun-splashed morning of April 15, concerns of an attack were as far from the minds of Bostonians as dreams of another World Series. That day, the Sox defeated the Tampa Bay Rays 3–2. But as quickly as the jubilant fans filed out of Fenway, baseball glory became a non-thought when the bombings rocked the city and reminded the nation of the lingering ideological war that knows no battlefield.

  As Boylston Street became soaked in blood, the somber Sox boarded a plane for Cleveland. Their city was in pain, and the team took it to heart. They rallied and beat the Indians 7–2 the very next night.

  The Sox and Indians wore black armbands to honor the victims, and a giant American flag at Cleveland’s Progressive field flew at half-staff. There was a somber moment of silence prior to the first pitch. A young Indians fan presented the Sox with a sign he had written in red ink and adorned with hearts. The note, which was hung in Boston’s dugout, read, “From our city to your city: Our hearts and prayers go out to you, Boston. Love, Cleveland.” The Sox also hung in the dugout a jersey emblazoned with the number 617 (one of Boston’s area codes) and bearing the name Boston Strong. The jersey would stay with them for the rest of the season. The Sox continued to win and embarked on a torrid summer that saw them clinch the A.L. East on September 20. Along the way, they grew mountain man-style beards, played grind-it-out, blue-collar-style ball, and recaptured the city’s heart.

  “The one moment that really resonates with me is when we left here after the marathon bombing and when we stood on that line in Cleveland for the moment of silence,” first-year manager John Farrell told a Comcast Sports New England reporter after the Sox had beaten the Toronto Blue Jays to clinch the division. “In the clubhouse that day there were some things that came out, some individual personalities. That was so clear to me that our guys really understood our place, not just in the city of Boston, but responding to a very hard situation. We got off to a good start in April. That moment resonated with me that this had a chance to be something special.”77

  Outfielder Jonny Gomes began to emerge as one of the team’s most vocal leaders. During a double-header the Sunday after the terrorists were captured, Gomes used a bat with the words Boston Strong on it, as well as the names of the four people killed in the bombings and its aftermath. He later auctioned the bat off to benefit the One Fund.

  Camaraderie with survivors like Mery Daniel and the victims’ relatives started to grow. On May 7, Krystle Campbell’s mother, Patricia, threw out the first pitch. Friends said it was the first time they had seen her smile since her daughter was killed in the explosion. A key day in Heather Abbott’s recovery came on May 11, when she left Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital. She was just days out of the surgery to remove the lower section of her leg, and the team invited her to Fenway to toss out the first pitch. Abbott’s friends carried a banner and wore T-shirts that said “Heather Strong.”

  “I’m not the most athletic person,” Heather told reporters before the ceremony. She had practiced throwing with her physical therapist and was determined not to use her wheelchair on the field. She hopped to the mound on crutches and tossed the first pitch to catcher Jarrod Saltalamacchia. They hugged, and then David Ortiz signed a ball for her.

  The parade of survivors, first responders, and victims’ relatives to Fenway would become a recurring theme throughout the season. The emotional tributes and the images of these amazing survivors walking out to the mound inspired the team. On May 28, Jeff Bauman and Carlos Arredondo did the honors.

  By late summer, as the team continued to jockey for playoff position, the survivors struggled to regain control of their lives. On August 15, exactly four months after the bombing, little Jane Richard got a new prosthetic leg. A beaming picture of the little girl sporting the new limb was released to the media. In a statement accompanying the photo, the Richard family said:

  While she is getting more comfortable with it [the prosthetic leg], she is also limited with how much she can wear it at any one time. When she is able to have it on, she struts around on it with great pride and a total sense of accomplishment. Her strength, balance and comfort with the leg improve every day. Watching her dance with her new leg, which has her weight primarily on the other leg, is absolutely priceless.78

  Before Game 2 of the American League Championship Series against the Detroit Tigers at Fenway, Jane strode proudly across the field on her new leg and wearing a Dustin Pedroia jersey. She was joined by the children’s choir from St. Anne’s Church in Dorchester, and together they sang the national anthem. The Sox went on to beat Detroit for the pennant, only to face the mighty St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series. By this time, the team and the survivors were one. Symbols of the marathon could be seen all over Fenway Park as the “B Strong” logo was shaved into the grass, stit
ched on uniforms, and emblazoned on the Green Monster.

  The Sox took Game 1 of the World Series at Fenway by a score of 8–1, fueled by David Ortiz’s second grand slam of the post-season. Each time he stepped up to the plate, fans could hear the words This is our fucking city echoing in their minds.

  The Sox would lose the next two games but came roaring back in Game 4 after an inspirational speech by Ortiz in the dugout. “We better than this right here,” he told his teammates. “Let’s loosen up. Let’s play the game the way we do.”

  The Red Sox would not lose again.

  In Game 6, Boston found itself on the cusp of winning its third world championship in a decade and its first at Fenway Park since 1918. The city was electrified. Boston had rediscovered its passion through great pain, and on this night a wall of cheers would stem the steady flow of tears that had run through town like a river since Patriots’ Day.

  The game wasn’t even close. The Sox got up on the Cardinals early and never looked back.

  Fans were on their feet for the game’s first pitch and never sat down. This was history. This was healing.

  Ortiz was walked four times that night, three of them intentional. The Cardinals felt that he was simply too dangerous a player to allow him the chance to get wood on the ball. His teammates provided the power that night to fuel a 6–1 win. Still, he had provided enough post-season heroics to earn World Series MVP honors. As he did in April, Ortiz took the microphone on the field and spoke directly to the fans and the city of Boston.

  “I wanna say this is for you, Boston, you guys deserve it,” Ortiz said. “You’ve been through a lot this year and this is for all of you and all the families who struggled with the bombing earlier this year. This is for all of you.”

  The ballpark roared in appreciation.

  “This is our BLEEP city,” he added, replacing the infamous F-bomb and censoring himself for the national television audience.79