Making meaning and finding hope after the marathon bombing,

By Jennifer Pustz

I have so much to be thankful for. I should NOT feel so horrible.

But, I did feel horrible. Lost. Lonely. Exhausted. Often.

I was a sophomore in college. 18 years old.

I had spent several nights crying, not knowing how to get rid of the dull ache I felt inside of me. Now I was on my way to an intake session at the University Counseling Center, at the suggestion of my best friend. I had tried my best to hide my sadness, but having struggled herself, she saw right through me. I skipped my history class to make this appointment, trading time in a class I enjoyed for an hour that was one of the scariest of my young life. I sat in the corner of a slightly dim room with a box of Kleenex in one hand, sobbing and spilling out my inner emotions to a woman I had never met. After 45 minutes of listening, she suggested regular counseling.  An appointment was made for the next day.

I was so terrified that I almost called it off, but I knew I had to be brave, so I showed up the next day and weekly thereafter. It seemed to be helping, but then, after the third week of counseling, one of my closest friends seemed to turn on me without explaining why. He just shut me out. Suddenly. I was mad, confused, and hurt, not sure if I wanted to go on. I cried so much in therapy that afternoon—all I felt was despair. I could only imagine that he stopped being my friend because I was so messed up. Too much of a burden.

I was still the nerdy bookworm I had been in high school, but being at the university had opened my mind to new ideas, people, music, art, and lifestyles. It was exciting but at times overwhelming. I was a perfectionist, not satisfied with any grade lower than an A. As an Honors Program student, I was constantly surrounded by overachievers like me. By the time I entered counseling, I had pushed myself harder academically and emotionally than ever, so hard that I bottomed out. Nothing I did felt good enough. Slowly, over months, my counselor helped me to see and appreciate who I was becoming. Things would be OK, I thought.

Things were OK, at least for the rest of my undergrad years, but anxiety and depression were never too far away. I went on to grad school, still never feeling good enough. As the first in my family to graduate from college and pursue an advanced degree, I constantly compared myself to fellow students who went to better schools and came from families with more wealth and status. I was afraid I would be “found out” as the fraud I assumed I was. Every night, as I tried to go to sleep, my mind would swirl with thoughts of all the things I could have done differently, better, often reliving mistakes made years earlier. I often wished that I would fall asleep and never wake up.

There was also a lot of good happening in my life during graduate school. I fell in love and got married. I had a job that I enjoyed. But still, even when things were going well, I knew that eventually depression would find me. It felt inevitable.

I was in my late 20s when I first discussed my depression with my primary care physician, and she suggested I try an antidepressant. In my mind, this marked for me the moment of my “official” diagnosis of depression, even though the feelings had been longstanding. Now that I had been labeled with major depression, I had the comfort of a diagnosis and potential treatment, but also a fear that I was now associated with a condition that carried a great deal of stigma. How was this stuff going to change me? Could it really work? Would I need it the rest of my life? Did needing antidepressants to function mean that I was too weak to deal with problems on my own?

The first two weeks on Wellbutrin were difficult. I felt like someone had turned up the volume in my brain. I had trouble sleeping. Every so often I involuntarily twitched. I was afraid to tell the doctor. What if she took me off of the meds and I lost this opportunity to maybe get better?

And then, about two weeks later, the buzzing in my head stopped. One morning I woke up and everything felt “even,” as I came to describe it. The internal criticism stopped.  I could fall asleep and started sleeping a little more soundly. It felt like a miracle.

I finished my Ph.D. two weeks before my thirty-second birthday. Before I knew it, I had been offered what I long described as my dream job, and my husband and I moved to Boston. Everything about every day was new and exciting. I was happier than I thought I had any right to be. I was gliding.

But not for long. Depression continued to haunt me as I spent time in and out of therapy, on and off medications, feeling okay and not okay.

My last serious relapse in 2011-2012 was the scariest. I would often cry riding the train to work, wiping the tears from my face, trying not to call attention to myself. When I couldn’t take the pain any longer, I started therapy again, got my meds changed, and again, began to work toward feeling more even-keeled, but it took much longer this time. Sometimes I just wanted to disappear from the earth. I came home one night, curled into a ball on the ceramic tile of my bathroom and behind that closed door shaking and sobbing as quietly as I could so that I would not scare my husband.

Although I was generally quite open about talking to my family members about my depression, more often I felt the need to hide my pain. They did their best to support me and I did not blame them if at times they felt helpless. At the same time,  I felt guilty for causing them worry, broken because I could not seem to get better, and exhausted from living in a world I felt was filled with more pain than I could bear.

In early 2013, I decided I needed to find a new approach to managing my recurring depression. Although my symptoms had subsided thanks to regular therapy and medication, I feared another relapse, and I didn’t want more or different medications. Before moving to New England, I had a regular tai chi practice and was experimenting with mindfulness and meditation, both of which had helped me deal with the stress that tended to trigger depressive episodes. My search for similar experiences and training led me to the Benson Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine. I signed up for an eight-week session to learn the Relaxation Response that would begin on April 16, 2013.

The day before the program was scheduled to start was a sunny Patriot’s Day morning. I arrived in Boston at the time I would normally have arrived for work, but instead made my way to my volunteer assignment for the Boston Marathon. I had been volunteering at the race since my first year in Boston. As a recreational runner myself, it is a great way to support the running community, and something I am always honored to be part of. This year I would be working at the first water stop after the finish line.

I was ready for a long day on my feet, first turning the caps on the water bottles to make them easier for the runners to open, and then handing them out with a smile and congratulations as runners moved through the stretch along Boylston Street after finishing. I was surprised at how physically beat up many of them looked--some encrusted with sweat or bleeding in spots where they had been chaffed by clothing. Faces winced as legs hobbled slowly forward, a situation I could relate to only too clearly, having finished the Chicago Marathon about six months before. Some runners were in better shape and had the smiles I expected to see. Just being there to help these runners was a very emotional experience for me as I shared with them all the joy and pain of finishing 26.2 miles.

Hours passed. I watched the numbers on the runners’ bibs get higher, indicating that we were getting deeper into the field of over 25,000 participants. My feet and lower back started to hurt from prolonged standing. I remember looking at a clock on a Boylston Street building that read 2:00pm. My anticipated check out time was still 4 hours away.

At 2:50 pm, as I was looking down Boylston Street toward the finish, I heard an explosion, followed by a plume of smoke, then another explosion. Fireworks, I wondered? The runners continued down the stretch and because I was so used to seeing battered bodies, I could not tell from their faces what had happened. And I was afraid to ask. Then I saw a female runner coming toward us with a look of horror on her face. Soon, the emergency vehicles began screaming down Boylston Street toward the finish, an area that was now a cloud of smoke and blinking lights from emergency vehicles.

In a world where news and information are available almost immediately, there was a void—no one knew what was going on. Speculations and rumors spread. Then, one of the first responders asked us to clear the area. They were looking for a third unexploded bomb. All I remember is a sense of unreality as the scene unfolded around me. I wanted to help but was afraid to help at the same time. No one knew where to go but someone told us to go to the Fairmount Copley Hotel, located on the other side of the Square.

I cut through Copley Square, running behind the big white medical tent to the corner across from Huntington Avenue. The hotel was in lock-down. Emergency personnel were pushing people on stretchers toward waiting ambulances. At 3:20, the first of many text messages started arriving from friends and family, those near and far. Where was I? Was I OK?

A volunteer wearing one of the white jackets designating her as medical staff approached me with a man in a wheelchair, a thin but very fit middle-aged man, with sandy brown hair and a beard. Michael. He was shivering in his thin runner’s singlet and shorts and was desperate to get his gear bag back, which contained warm clothes. The medical staff had been treating him for stress fractures after he crossed the finish line. He did not have a phone – could one of us text his wife to let her know where he was and that he was OK? Then Michael and I were alone. I sent the text “I am with Michael – he is OK – are you OK?” I still don’t know if that message ever made it to her.

I’m not sure how long we waited at that corner across from the medical tent but at some point I decided I needed to do something, to take action and make sure that Michael reconnected with his family. I decided to wheel him to the family meeting area and try to find his gear bag so he would have some warm clothes and his cell phone.

For such a lean runner, he was much harder to push than I expected. As we came to the end of the block, there was a rough spot in the curb cut. I hit it with a thud, knocking Michael forward and practically out of the chair. He reacted with an expression of pain. Until then I had managed to keep my emotions in check, for the most part, but now I started to cry and my hands began to shake. “I am so sorry,” I told him, and I was. All of a sudden, I realized where I was, what had happened, and what I was doing ...

Now Michael comforted me. I needed to take my mind off of what was immediately happening, so I asked Michael to describe his wife to me. “She has brown hair. She’s beautiful, and she should be wearing a brown coat,” he said. We got to the family meeting area but she was not there. My heart sank. I told Michael I would not leave him until he was back with his family.

In the meantime, I would retrieve his gear bag. Amazingly, not only did I find the school bus that had brought his bag back to Boston but the volunteers actually gave it to me to take to him. I returned to the meeting area and was overjoyed to find Michael’s wife standing next to him. When he saw me carrying his bag, Michael exclaimed, “My angel!” His wife and I needed no words of greeting as we reached out to one another to hug, sobbing with relief, for what seemed like a long time.

When I was certain that there was no more I could do to help Michael and his wife, we said goodbye.

I wandered from Back Bay to my office on Cambridge Street in a state of shock, stopping regularly to respond to a steady flow of text messages coming from friends, family, and coworkers. As I opened the door at my workplace and saw one of my coworkers at reception, I let out a series of sobs that shook me to the core. Everyone who was in the building at the time came down to the lobby to see me, hug me. I called my husband. My supervisor drove me home. All I could do was crawl into bed.

Not surprisingly, the Benson Henry program did not start the next day as scheduled. There was too much uncertainty about travel in the city. The people responsible for the bombing were still at large. By the time the program started, one week later, I had spent seven days feeling completely numb, going through the motions of life. I can hardly remember it. But I still remember the first guided meditation in the program clearly, a body scan, and how good it felt to finally find some brief moments of peace in my own body. The next seven weeks brought more meditation experiences, opportunities to share the impact of these practices with the group, and to listen to the stories of others who had sought this program for a whole variety of reasons. The most valuable part of the program for me was learning to recognize cognitive distortion and negative automatic thoughts and to reframe them in positive and constructive ways. The many years of “should,” statements, all-or-nothing thinking, perfectionism, and other unproductive ways of thinking, slowly dissipated.

I was extremely sad when the program ended, so I was thrilled when the group leader asked if I would consider helping the next group as a peer counselor. Participating in the program again, in a different role, was perhaps even more enlightening for me. Now that I wasn’t focusing as much on myself, I was able to see how profoundly these practices impacted others. In addition to learning how to meditate, I was also motivated to restart my tai chi practice, and eventually pursue a teacher training program at a local studio.

My relationship to depression began to change. As part of the Benson Henry program, we talked often about gratitude and making meaning. I had always been careful not to take things for granted, but after the Marathon Bombing, every day felt like a gift. I had walked away from the scene with my life and my limbs when others were not so fortunate. I was determined to find some way to bring some good out of this tragic event. If that day was going to change my life, it was going to change it in the very best way possible.

For the first time in my life, depression was not a hurdle to overcome, but part of me that I needed to accept, for better or worse. By acknowledging it and realizing how much the associated pain contributed to my capacity for kindness and empathy, I have been able to better cope with the occasional “funks,” none of which have escalated into the relapses I previously experienced. Feeling gratitude is key to helping me understand and accept depression as part of what makes me the unique person that I am.

I began longing for new and meaningful challenges, opportunities to further explore and understand my own health and wellbeing, and the chance to improve the lives of others.

I had a nearly 20 year career as a historian behind me and was our household’s primary wage earner. The decision to go back to school to study nutrition and public health was both the easiest and most difficult decision I have ever made. But I had to do something.

I often thought about Michael. At first, I had been so afraid to take charge of the situation, but I did. I met that fear and it changed me. I made a difference. I could do it again.

In May I will graduate from Tufts University with a dual degree in nutrition communication and public health. I have been befriended and supported by a community of scholars and researchers who have given me extraordinary opportunities to learn and grow. I am excited to see what comes next. I am truly blessed.

I have SO much to be thankful for. And I feel wonderful.