“Does Diana know?”

The rest of the details surrounding my learning about the Boston Marathon bombing, which took place ten years ago today, are somewhat hazy. But that question, which I overheard several of my grad school classmates ask almost in unison, sticks out sharply in my mind. A decade later, it still fills me with that same foreboding feeling when I think about it, even though the question has been long since answered.

I was born in a city about thirty miles south of Boston. Patriots’ Day is a regional holiday in New England which takes place on the third Monday in April, celebrating the anniversary of some of the first battles of the Revolutionary War such as Lexington and Concord. (This is not to be confused with the observance of Patriot Day which is what the powers that be decided to call September 11th.) Patriots’ Day is observed in Massachusetts and five other states; there are battle re-enactments, and it also is the day that the Boston Marathon is held. When I was growing up, we always had Patriots’ Day off from school; my family’s tradition was to go cheer on runners at the starting line, then go back to my grandparents’ house for a tasty lunch, usually watch a baseball game on tv.

When the fragile bubble of my family life violently popped and I had to leave Massachusetts at age 11, it was woefully against my will. Clinging to anything that related to Boston – largely sports teams – became my way to hold on to that part of my life that was “the before”, which brought me comfort in a way I’m still trying to fully understand. As bad as things often were “before”, it was better than the “breaking” and the “after”…I missed my grandparents and the few friends I had. I missed my house and my neighborhood. I missed being around people who sounded like me when they talked (apparently once you leave the Boston area, your accent is as entertaining as an exotic bird exhibit in a zoo). In an emotional sense, my family breaking apart at age 11 was the first Boston bombing I experienced, with the tragedy at the Marathon in 2013 being the second. That feels almost disrespectful to say, but it isn’t inaccurate.

I leaned so very hard into maintaining a death grip on New England, or at least the idea of it, that it became entrenched in who I am as a person. Today it is irremovable from my identity as a whole. There have been times in the last 23 years where it’s felt like a vital organ inside my body, shaped like a Red Sox emblem, perhaps.

By the time I reached grad school, and as a cohort we went through those silly icebreaker games, my routine introductory tidbits included at least one mention of my being from the Boston area. It was usually what I led with. (Still is, really.) So, on that fateful day in April, it was no surprise at all that when news broke about what happened, my classmates immediately thought of me. “Does Diana know?” I heard them asking as I entered the classroom for our afternoon lecture.

As it happened, I didn’t know; I’d been caught up in studying in the library all day and hadn’t seen the news (which ten years ago was certainly accessible, but a little less at our fingertips than it is now). One member of our cohort was also from New England and we’d bonded over that; I remember him looking distraught, an expression on his face that disturbed me because I’d gotten to know him as a very levelheaded guy, calm in the face of crisis. (I’d sustained a dramatic head injury in the semester before and he’d been the one to attend to me until paramedics got there, long story.) I remember saying, “Know what?” I remember feeling trepidation fill my body. I remember my classmates telling me what had happened, though I don’t remember their exact words. I remember feeling the blood leave my face, and stammering that I had to go make a call. I remember leaving the classroom, intending to touch base with my aunt to make sure our family and loved ones were safe, even though our tradition was to go to the starting line, not the finish line, even though that tradition was largely lost with my childhood.

It’s at this point that my memory gets fuzzy; I don’t remember if I actually did get in touch with my family. I can tell you that I did somehow get to confirm they were all fine. Much of it remains foggy, but over the course of the next however many hours, I obsessively watched the news coverage of the manhunt and eventual arrest of the perpetrator. My emotional connection to Boston, forged at birth, plated in steel at 11 years old, became thickly coated in titanium at 24.

While accepting it as part of myself, I try not to look too closely most of the time at my connection to Boston, because I end up wondering whether or not it’s unhealthy. People have tried to tell me that since I haven’t lived there in so long, I’m not really from there, and I invariably get angry at that, sometimes inordinately so. It’s a big, irrevocable piece of me. And for proof of that, I need look no further than the way in which I found out about the Boston Marathon bombing ten years ago. If it were just news to share, my classmates would have been asking if all of us knew. But that’s not what they’d said. It wasn’t, “Does everybody know?” It was, “Does Diana know?” Because where I came from has become a crucial part of who I am.

Because I always have been, and always will be, Boston Strong.