Stronger

by Jeff Bauman

  Mom cries every time she thinks of them. “They watched their son die,” she says.

  “Martin was Boston Strong,” the family said in their lone statement to the press. That’s the only time those words choked me up. And they’ve never made me more proud.

  But Spaulding wasn’t a community. It was the Island of Misfit Toys. Nobody wanted to be there, but we were broken, so we had nowhere else to go. Spaulding was not a jolly place, even though they tried to make it as jolly as they could.

  And just like the toys on the island, we all had one goal: to get out.

  I started working on that the first day. I had been practicing my transfers at Boston Medical, so by the time I reached Spaulding I no longer needed my board. I could easily slide from my bed to my wheelchair, then onto my mat in the gym, which was more like a single bed covered in a sheet than those mats you nap on in kindergarten.

  I still couldn’t lie on my stomach because of my surgical wound, so my therapist, Carlyn Wells, told me to lie on my side. She grabbed my leg and pulled it backward as far as she could. At first I almost screamed. It hurt for her to touch my leg, much less pull on it, but once I got over the shock it felt so good. My muscles had tightened up from two weeks of lying in bed, but also from the shock of the blast. It was like my body had clenched, then never let go. It felt so good for Carlyn to pull me apart.

  After the stretch, while I was still lying on my side, she asked me to lift my right leg. Higher, she said. Higher. I could lift it only a few times.

  I rolled over on my other side and lifted my left leg. It was even weaker than the right.

  I sat up and I worked on leg lifts from a seated position. I hated looking at my legs. They were like dancing sausages, with bandages over the ends. Ten lifts, and I was sweating.

  “It’s not weakness, it’s muscle trauma,” Carlyn told me. “Although you do need to get stronger.”

  I lifted free weights with my arms: curls, shoulder shrugs, extensions.

  “Everything is connected,” Carlyn told me.

  I hadn’t just lost my legs; I’d changed the role of each muscle in my body. Sitting up was harder without legs, because I had to rely on my core. Balance meant squaring and lifting my shoulders, not just setting my thighs. When you walk, you can slump your upper body, because your leg muscles can compensate. It’s not a good way to walk, but most people do it that way, at least some of the time. I wasn’t going to be able to “take steps off” anymore. I had to be upright and strong, because my new legs would be more like stilts than the bionics I had promised my nephew Cole. They would support me, but only my upper body would keep them beneath me.

  Since I couldn’t sleep, I chose the first training session of the morning. It was about two hours long, so I was usually done by 10:30. Soon after, when I was most tired, a speech therapist would come to my room. Mostly, we talked. At the end, she gave me five words, then came back an hour later and asked me what they were. When that wasn’t a problem, she gave me ten more, then came back the next day and asked me to repeat them. She gave me math homework.

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked her. “Your job is stupid.” I was joking with her, but only partially. I knew she was testing for brain damage, and I hated it.

  “You’re fine,” she told me after a week of torture.

  Then there was psychological counseling, both individual and group. And occupational therapy designed to help me find solutions for practical chores.

  Mom and Aunt Jenn always arrived in the late morning. (My dad had the evening shift, and it was better if they never saw each other.) Mom had taken time off from work to be with me, but there wasn’t much she could do. She fidgeted around the room, asking me questions, but I was often frustrated, and I didn’t feel like talking.

  Fortunately, there was the mail. Aunt Jenn had put her address on the Facebook page, and cards and gifts had come flooding in. She packed them up every morning, then picked up Mom and drove her to Spaulding. Mom didn’t like driving in the city.

  I couldn’t believe the nice things people wrote. Or how much they cared. Most of them weren’t even from Boston, but they had been following my story, and they wanted to help. Businesses were donating a portion of their sales; small towns were holding fund-raisers; families were pooling resources. Letters would include checks for hundreds of dollars.

  A hundred dollars, for a stranger? That’s a big deal.

  “How can that be, Mom?” I asked.

  “Jeffrey,” Mom said, holding my hand as if she was delivering bad news, “people have given you more than $100,000.”

  A hundred thousand dollars?! I had dropped out of college over a $900 debt. I had been making less than $16,000 a year. Now people had donated $100,000 to help me, just because my legs had been pulverized?

  It’s stupid to say I would have traded the money for my legs. Of course I would have. But I wasn’t even thinking like that. I was too overwhelmed.

  And it’s stupid to focus just on the money.

  A woman living in Japan sent me a tiny replica of samurai armor. How cool is that?

  A man from Bend, Oregon, sent me a custom Epiphone Les Paul Gibson guitar. It was olive colored and stripped down, the most beautiful guitar I had ever seen, but the note made it one of a kind:

  I read about what happened to you and what you are going through, and although you don’t know me, I wanted you to know I’m thinking about you and sending prayers your way.… I read that you like to play guitar, so I’m sending you one that has been special to me. It’s nothing fancy, but it has a great tone and a good action on it. After a while, I have found that guitars become like old friends—consider this a gift from a new one.…

  It wasn’t just adults who gave from the heart. A ten-year-old boy broke open his piggy bank and sent me all his money. It was almost $20 in small bills and change.

  “Send him a PlayStation,” I said.

  “You can’t do that, Jeff,” Mom said.

  “Why not?”

  “You can’t buy something for everyone that gives to you.”

  “Why not?”

  Mom picked up another letter and read it: “ ‘I’m sure you’ve heard this over and over again by now, but you are truly a hero. I just want to thank you for being an inspiration to this entire nation. I’ve never seen a stronger, more resilient person in my life.’ ”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Why do people say that about me?”

  Mom looked at me. I hated being looked at. Did all those people writing letters know that? If they did, what would they have thought?

  “They admire your bravery,” Mom said.

  I wanted to say, But I’m not brave. I just lost my legs.

  I mean, some kid, in some other state, saved his money for years, probably taking the dishes off the table and putting his clean clothes away, doing chores for his mom. He saved up, probably to buy one of those Despicable Me minions or something—kids love the minions, right? I have a minion sticker on my wheelchair. Cole gave it to me.

  But does the kid buy the minion? No.

  He gives his money to a stranger.

  And it wasn’t only that kid. There were dozens of kids who sent me their allowance money. Kindergarten classes drew me pictures. Kids sold their toys to raise funds for bombing victims. “This is so you can feel better,” they wrote.

  Maybe someday I’ll start a charity. I’ll find kids who have done something kind, and I’ll give them a gift in return, because that’s real bravery, caring so much about someone else.

  No, I guess that’s stupid. There are better ways to show that kindness matters. And it does. Nothing makes you happier than a kid writing to say you are their hero.

  But it was also hard. People would write and tell me, “You are Boston Strong, Jeff.” Or “You are what makes this country great.” Or “I know if you can make it through this, Jeff, that means we’ll all be okay.”

  But what if I didn’t make it? What if I broke down?

  Wh
at if people saw how frustrated the little things made me?

  The workouts were punishing. By the time I had advanced to thigh lifts, my legs were burning. I had to lie on my side and lift each leg ten times, but there were days I couldn’t do it. My muscles weren’t ready. They would clench and spasm. I had to pound on my legs, digging my thumbs into my thighs to loosen the muscles, or the pain would keep getting worse.

  At times like that, I wondered, What if I quit?

  What if I just accepted the chair?

  What if I never felt normal again?

  I was never a subscriber to the “no pain, no gain” school of life. Doctors had to confiscate weights from one guy in Spaulding, who was injured in a snowmobile accident, so he wouldn’t work out unsupervised in his room. He kept asking and asking, so they let him be the first patient to enter the new building. He was wearing an American flag shirt when he rolled through the door.

  What if the world expected me to be that guy?

  It wasn’t my personality. I was never competitive. I was just… ordinary. I played softball in a league, but mostly for the beer. I loved pickup basketball games, but I didn’t particularly care if we won.

  Baseball was my game, even if I wasn’t the best player. That was my cousin, Big D. Derek got a full ride to Bridgeport University in Connecticut, where he was a four-year starter. He was a big left-handed pitcher. He didn’t strike out a lot of guys, maybe because his fastball was only in the high eighties, but he’d knock them down, inning after inning. I thought he was going pro for sure, but he never got the call. That was how he ended up paving roads for Uncle Bob.

  My half brothers on my dad’s side, Chris and Alan, were hockey players. My dad even built a hockey rink in the backyard. He used marine-grade plywood for the walls at each end and a wooden frame to hold the ice, and every year around Thanksgiving, when I was up for a visit and it was freezing in Concord, he’d say, “Let’s go set it up, boys.”

  We’d work the whole weekend nailing supports into the boards, while Dad flooded the frame, let the water harden into ice, then flooded it again. He’d do that maybe fifteen times, so the ice would stay solid all winter. It was usually about midnight when he finally turned on the big floodlights, connected by extension cords to the house, and lit up our work. Chris could stay out there all night in short sleeves, even though it was minus twenty degrees. He had a ninety-mile-an-hour slapshot, and he’d work on it for hours. I think if he hadn’t gotten off track, he could have played for a Division I college.

  I usually lasted twenty minutes. Then the chill got to me, and I had to call it a night.

  But that wasn’t an option now. No matter how much it hurt, there was no way I could settle for the chair.

  Maybe it would have been different if I’d been in a car accident. Then I wouldn’t have had so many people watching me, and hoping for me, and caring about whether I succeeded.

  Then my injuries wouldn’t have been intentional. They wouldn’t have been the work of people who were trying to hurt me and destroy my life. People I could never let win.

  Maybe if it had been an accident, I would have given in to the fear, because knowing your life is different, and that a huge part of you is missing forever… that’s terrifying. Alone at night, I’d sometimes think, Screw it, Jeff. It’s too much. How can they expect you to keep getting up from this?

  It’s easier, after all, to lie down and accept your fate, especially when your legs are throbbing and your burns are rubbed raw.

  But I’d think of all the people out there, rooting for me. I’d think of the kids, kneeling beside their beds, saying prayers for my recovery. And the next day, I’d be back on the arm bicycle, pedaling faster, or I’d be pushing myself to do ten leg lifts this time, then eleven, then twelve.

  You can do it, Jeff. It’s not just about you. It’s not just for you.

  You’re Boston Strong.

  16.

  Before Spaulding, I tried to stay out of the media. During my second week at BMC, Kat gave me a list of one hundred interview requests and asked if I wanted to do any of them. I chose one: GQ magazine, which was putting together an article about the effort to save lives that included six main points of view. Why did I choose GQ? I don’t know. I’ve never read the magazine. But it’s a gentleman’s quarterly, right? That sounds classy to me.

  That article wouldn’t come out for more than a month, though, so my first public comments happened at old Spaulding, when I did an interview with Gerry Callahan for local sports radio station WEEI. I didn’t think about it too much. Mr. Callahan had grown up in Chelmsford, and he was my uncle Bob’s lifelong best friend. I had known him since I was a little kid, and I still remember when he came to my third-grade class to talk to us.

  If you listen to his show, you probably know about his character Bob the Drunk. That’s my uncle! “Highly fictionalized,” Uncle Bob insists, “highly fictionalized”—but I don’t know if I believe him.

  So why wouldn’t I talk with Mr. Callahan? It was only a five-minute phone interview, and I could do it from my hospital bed. The conversation got a little deep at times, especially for a cutup like Gerry Callahan, but it was fun. Mostly, we just chatted about how I was doing.

  Well, people blew up. A few liberals didn’t like it, I guess, because Gerry Callahan is conservative, and they made a bit of a stink about politicizing things, or something like that, I don’t know.

  Mostly, though, it was other media. They couldn’t believe I had turned down network news, Oprah Winfrey, and the Boston Globe to give an exclusive to local sports radio. But it wasn’t an exclusive, and it wasn’t a political statement. It was just a favor for Uncle Bob.

  “Ah, just let it go,” I said, when reporters started pressing for an explanation. “I don’t feel like dealing with it.” I guess I was naive. I didn’t think anyone would care what I said. Now that I realized people were probably going to overreact, I figured it was best to keep quiet.

  Besides, I’d already agreed to one other feature interview, and it wasn’t with the Boston Globe, even though they were the biggest newspaper in town and, in some ways, this was our story together. A lot of reporters, from all kinds of media sources, were aggressive or disrespectful of our privacy, especially in that first week. Erin’s sister Gail caught an ABC reporter in Boston Medical Center eavesdropping on family conversations and trying to strike up casual conversations. Another reporter tried to enter a survivor’s therapy session that Remy was attending. Early Friday morning, during the manhunt, a reporter called Erin’s mom and, as a pressure tactic, implied that talking with him would be helpful to finding the missing suspect.

  Kat had a run-in with a Boston Globe reporter who was working on a big article centered on a time line of the first week. We had asked Kat not to give any information to the media, so she told the reporter she couldn’t comment on my role in identifying the bombers. He responded that if she wouldn’t comment, then he could question the Facebook page that was my main source of donations. There were dozens of ways to give to victims that first week, and some were sketchy at best. Kat knew that any doubt expressed by a leading newspaper could affect the site, but she held firm, just as we’d asked.

  The reporter for the New York Times, Tim Rohan, was different. My brother Chris had met him outside Boston Medical, and he had written a nice article about my dad. Dad brought Tim to my room the next day, and we chatted. Tim didn’t ask for an interview or try to sell himself to me. Mostly, we talked about the Red Sox, who were off to a surprising hot start and in first place. Like me, Tim was a big baseball fan.

  He was also a twenty-three-year-old intern.

  Before the bombing, the New York Times, apparently, hadn’t thought much of the Boston Marathon. It was a great event, but a boring story. The same every year. So they sent one intern from their sports department to cover it. Tim Rohan was the only New York Times reporter on the scene for one of the biggest events of the year.

  And to the paper’s credit, they let
him run with it. They didn’t send a big shot for follow-up interviews. They let Tim handle it the way he wanted to. And it worked, at least with me.

  When Kat suggested I agree to one big article to tell my story, I instantly thought of Tim. I liked him. He was a good kid. I didn’t care where he worked; I just wanted to help him if I could. I figured this could be his big break.

  Mom wasn’t so sure. “What’s he doing here?” she snapped the first time she saw Tim with his recorder. She was even less happy when she found out he was planning to trail me around, sometimes with a photographer.

  But Tim was hard not to like: very friendly and polite. Big D bought me a PlayStation while I was at Spaulding—primarily, I think, so he wouldn’t have to make conversation. With a PlayStation, Big D and I could trash-talk each other, and neither of us would have to think about my legs. I introduced Tim to my favorite game, MLB: The Show. Don’t tell the New York Times, but we spent hours together playing The Show. Of course, he was an intern, so he was probably barely getting paid.

  Mom didn’t warm up to him, though, until she found out Tim was also raised by a single working mother. And that he had worked his way through college. He had started in engineering, like me, before deciding to take a shot at his dream and switched to journalism. After that, Mom loved him. Maybe she saw a different version of me in him.

  Even now, months later, she asks about him. “So how’s Tim doing, Jeff?”

  I shake my head. “The worst thing happened to him, Mom. The very worst. The New York Times hired him full-time to cover the Mets.”

  Ha, ha, Tim. Good luck with that. The Mets are terrible.

  17.

  I read Tim’s article about my time at Spaulding recently, and it felt so foreign. The guy in the article seems so sad and alienated. He stares out the window. He answers questions with three words.