BOSTON — Every time Roseann Sdoia comes home, she must climb 18 steps — six stairs into the building, another 12 to her apartment. It is an old building in Boston’s North End, with doors that are big and heavy, not an easy place for an amputee to live.
When she left the hospital, a month after the Boston marathon bombing, she had a choice: She could find another place to live, one more suitable for someone who wears a prosthesis that replaces most of her right leg. Or, she could stay.
“Early on when all this happened, so many people were telling me to move out of the city and move out of my apartment because of the stairs and I don’t have an elevator and parking is not very convenient,” she recalls. “But I have been able to get past all of that.”
In that, she mirrors Boston itself.
In the course of a year, limbs have been replaced, psyches soothed, the wounds sustained in a moment at the marathon’s finish line have at least begun to heal. At the same time, a city shaken by an unthinkable act of terrorism has returned to its usual rhythms — sadder, but some say stronger, as well.