What ‘Boston strong’ means to one Bostonian

One Leafs’ fan stirred up controversy Monday night after being pictured holding a sign reading “Toronto Stronger” during game three of the Toronto and Boston playoff series. Complete with a blue and white ribbon, the sign was a direct reference to the “Boston Strong” slogan used in support of the city of Boston in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings.

Some Bruins fans, and citizens of Boston, were upset by the sign because they felt it was offensive to what the “Boston Strong” campaign represented. Margaret H. Coit, who lives in Boston, wrote this piece in reaction to the “Toronto Stronger” incident.

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I live about three blocks from the Boston Marathon finish line. April 15th was sunny, bright, the Red Sox won in a walk-off, trees were in full bloom, church bells rang out as the winners crossed the finish line, and the crowds swarmed the streets on my TV screen.

I was sitting on my couch – I was working from home as many Bostonians do as commuting is near impossible on Marathon Monday – and I heard explosions. I didn’t know they were explosions, but I knew they didn’t sound like the usual construction noises from the condos being built across the street. These noises sounded close enough and loud enough that I was concerned something was happening to my roof.

I thought I might have felt a shock wave, but now I’m not so sure. My condo sits behind a gap between two skyscrapers that frame the blast site. Maybe I felt it; maybe I just felt some kind of “disturbance in the force,” some kind of tearing of fabric, something rattling around the city streets like a pinball. Somehow, some part of my brain knew something wasn’t right, especially once the sirens started wailing away, a sound that seemed to go on for days afterwards. But I didn’t react.

Then my sister texted me. I hadn’t heard from her since she went to watch the elite runners come in earlier that day. All she wrote was “oh my god.” My brain flashed back to the booming noises I’d heard. “Yeah?” I eloquently replied.

She responded: “Bomb. Finish line. Mass casualties.”

Maybe that’s when I felt a shudder, the shock wave of realization.

I un-muted my TV and had to catch my breath. I don’t know what I thought I would see, but for whatever reason, it wasn’t pools and rivulets of blood on the sidewalk, blood everywhere, debris and broken glass, fences and posts tangled and in disarray, people running and screaming, smoke hanging and coloring the scene with a dismal gray. But that’s what I saw.

I grabbed my phone and with shaking hands called my girlfriend at work. Instead of speaking, I found I could only scream garbled phrases about how much blood there was and how I had heard them. She told me she’d be safe. We hung up and I kept crying.

I heard it. I heard it. The sounds of the explosions replayed over and over in my ears like heartbeats. Boom. Boom. Distorted, they were drawn out and slow, then rapid like gunfire. Over and over. I heard it, but was distant enough to not be physically damaged by it. I hovered in an uncomfortable position between having been there and having heard about it. I experienced it from a sensory perspective, but not physically.

I crumpled to the floor of my living room, blood all over my television, crying and trying to catch my breath, repeating, “Oh my God,” to myself.

Looking at the television, I saw recognizable emergency response behaviors, patterns embedded in me from all my years working in hospitals and from my public health training. I paused – pulled all my energy into immediately shutting down my emotional response, silencing it – and looked at the scene. “Do they need me?” I asked myself.

I went through what I could offer, what they would need in that moment, and whether needs were being met. “No,” I thought, “all response needs being met.” (If you are wondering how first responders and others rushed towards the smoke rather than away, that’s how. Practice, training, and compartmentalization.)

I released the feelings that were being set aside, and they washed over me again. I couldn’t take my eyes off the TV screen. There was blood everywhere on that sidewalk, where I commuted. People were screaming. The fear was so sharp, so acute, I could feel it on my skin.

I focused on the continuing texts from my sister. We agreed to go to my mother’s house a few blocks away. Finally something else to focus on: look away from the blood… where are my socks… where are my shoes… put the shoes on the feet that by the grace of God I’d walk on another day… I was able to stop crying, but my hands shook violently, my breath was shallow and occasionally I would whisper “oh my God” again. In hindsight I must have been trying to calm myself.

On the street, a crowd huddled around the dry cleaner’s, where a TV screen was visible through the window. A few runners wrapped in thermal blankets huddled with their families, walking slowly and painfully. Families in Red Sox gear corralled their children, their grim faces belying the confidence in their voices.

When we got to my mother’s house, I hugged her and said, “I heard it, Mum. I felt it in my home, I heard it.” I was trying to communicate to her that I’d experienced it on what felt like a different level, that I felt altered somehow.

If I’d been able to say, “I saw it,” it would be easy for someone to understand the impact of my sensory experience; somehow, “I heard it,” doesn’t seem to carry that weight. But I heard it. I heard it. And I was still hearing it in my head.

I knelt down next to my dogs, grabbed their warm fur in my hands and pulled my face close to theirs and started crying again. They knew something was wrong, as dogs do. They followed me around, and several times came over to put a furry head on my knee.

The TV was on all afternoon but we barely watched it. I was responding to endless texts and Facebook messages and tweets checking on me. I told my sister to email my father, sister and brother-in-law who were overseas. We shared theories and news and rumors as they spread. Bad news was that one of the dead was a child; good news was that bombs hadn’t gone off under the grandstands.

The first time I saw actual video of the explosions, the TV station showed it one… two… three times and I got off the couch and went into the other room. I looked out the window and started to cry again, knowing my family was right there, but needing the separation to face my own horror.

Social media provided a deluge of well-wishers and voices of sympathy. I’d always found those “thoughts and prayers” to be somewhat insincere and trite, more for the sender than the recipient, but somehow when it was my neighborhood, each one touched my heart.

In this state of grief, I felt totally and completely alone. I had heard it, and kept hearing it, and no one around me could understand the sounds I heard. I was alone in my suspension between having “been there” and “not been there.”

That was my experience for the next few days. Feeling like no one else understood or like I was the only one not moving on with my life, like everyone around me was moving a million miles an hour into the future and I was stuck in that moment on Monday afternoon. I wanted to be around my family and friends and no one else, only be around people in my neighborhood who understood the horror of this happening where you lived out the mundane details of your life, shopping, banking, commuting.

They kept telling us “turn off the news,” and to stop watching footage. That would have worked if we weren’t living it every day, reminded by the streetlight banners for the marathon and the traffic and the police everywhere. We couldn’t turn off the news footage; we were the news footage. But I was tired, so tired, tired of the media’s eyes and the guns and people walking around living life normally when I felt utterly broken inside.

My nerves were fried. I could cry at the slightest hint of stress. I remember the week like a montage of life in a surreal dystopian version of my city: walking by barricades and military police checkpoints, state police with massive military-grade weapons at the ready standing along my commute, more of them guarding the entrances to the hospital where I worked, FBI and ATF agents wandering around the neighborhood, and the giant chunk of city suddenly off-limits and under the domain of strangers in white suits moving slowly around the crime scene.

Helicopters constantly hovering in the blue spring skies, media trucks and setups from around the world clogging the sidewalks and staring at me, my family and friends in our grief like we were performers in some horrible soap opera. Sirens echoing everywhere, a seemingly constant wailing and screaming. Growing piles of flowers and signs and running shoes. Growing numbers of injured persons reported.

Tuesday night my friend, a Captain in the U.S. Army who served in Tikrit, Iraq, called me. “You heard something,” he said, “that not many people we know have heard. And I want you to know that I know what you heard. I’ve heard it.” This phone call ranks among the greatest gestures anyone has offered me in my entire life.

I talked – I tried to describe the sound – he knew how it was a different sound from any other, how heavily it weighs on your heart, how it fills your ears and won’t leave. He told me I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t crazy for feeling like I had been there when I wasn’t.

I cried, I asked about the different guns the MPs were carrying, I cried some more, I told him about my grief, and my fear, and he listened, mostly silently. When I hung up, the pain was lessened; the terror of being alone and misunderstood had been eased.

In describing the sounds to him, I started hearing them less in my head. I started sleeping more. Thursday I got my appetite back.

I’d hear the President speak, or hear others on TV express sympathy. Once I overcame the shock of hearing my city’s name in that context – that wave of “Oh God, this actually happened,” a brief flashback to the sounds of the explosions and that horrible moment – it was a genuine comfort to hear people telling me to be strong. I didn’t feel strong, to be honest, so people reminding me was valuable. Strangers from all over the world sent their love to me and told me about fond memories of my city. That was powerful.

People from places where explosions are more common – one from Syria stands out in my memory – took pictures of themselves holding signs with words of true sympathy, with the message that no matter where you are or what your life is like, explosions bring pain and suffering.

I have vivid memories of lying in bed wanting to stay there instead of living my life. I scrolled through text messages I’d received with words of love and support, reminding me that things would be okay when I couldn’t summon that belief for myself.

In those messages, I found the motivation to get up. Similar moments happened with my hand on the doorknob of my home, not wanting to go outside. The warmth and kindness from people, even (perhaps especially) those saying, “I can’t even fathom what you are feeling right now,” made the difference between staying in the dark and pushing myself into the light.

Boston Strong is not just another slogan. It’s not just a sports thing. It’s my fellow citizens telling me I’m not alone. It’s an abbreviation for all those words that helped me. It’s not just a description, it can be read as a reminder: “Boston, strong.” Be strong, Boston.

I was at the Bruins game on Wednesday, April 17th against the Sabres. The videos are everywhere online; fans singing the national anthem together, a tearful tribute, the rousing chant of “We Are Boston” from the crowd. It was a difficult game for me to attend; being in a crowd and the loud, incessant banging of pucks off the glass made me incredibly anxious.

That crowd, along with hordes that took to the streets after the lockdown and capture of Suspect 2 that Friday, may have given the impression that somehow a chapter was closed, that we were moving on, Boston strong and triumphant over adversity. That is an illusion. “Boston Strong” is not a battle cry; it is a reminder from Bostonians to one another.

The fan in Toronto with a sign reading “Toronto Stronger” with a ribbon of the Leafs’ blue and white replacing the Boston Marathon’s blue and yellow, and those continuing the “TorontoStronger” hashtag on Twitter was shockingly insensitive.

It was mocking something that kept me going in some truly dark days. It was telling me that what I went through was insignificant, that Boston Strong was an empty idea that could be applied anywhere, that I was silly for needing my community. It ignored how much Bostonians needed to communicate to one another that we were in this crisis together, that we were all grieving.

The overwhelming response I’ve seen from Leafs fans and Canadians in general has been mortification at the sign and a desire to dissociate themselves from that individual. I am genuinely grateful for kindness and support I’ve received from our neighbors over the past few weeks.

That sign was cruel. It was hurtful in the same way the conspiracy theorists are hurtful to me; their arguments and videos and disdain paint me, someone in pain, as a dupe, an idiot for having the feelings I do about what happened at my doorstep. These insults make me feel alone again, feel like what I went through didn’t actually mean anything to the world, that my terror went unheard and that the tears we shed didn’t matter.

The fact that these insults are excused as being “just joking” by so many on social media only reinforces these fears. It’s not about political correctness, or about sparring over which hockey fans are the most unruly and violent, or about the role of the media or government and use of slogans in advertising. It’s about the fact that people can be publicly cruel and lack compassion in a time of grief, and a handful of individuals can find it not only defensible, but funny. It’s not a joke.

My sister and I both dreamed about explosions last night. Sirens still make my blood run cold. There is still a small part of us bleeding on that sidewalk. This will take time. It’s not a joke.

Strength, Boston.

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This article is not written or edited by Global News. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

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Margaret H. Coit is a blogger who lives in Boston, Massachusetts. Her personal blog can be found here.