This reminds me of a mother I worked with after the Marathon Bombings. In “ Beyond PTSD: Soldiers Have Injured Souls,” Diane Silver describes moral injury as a “deep soul wound that pierces a person’s identity, sense of morality, and relationship to society.” The term resurfaced early on in the COVID-19 pandemic when equipment shortages forced physicians to make decisions about who had the best chance of survival. The term “moral injury” was originally used to describe soldiers who have committed acts (or failed to act) against their own values. The soul, as the core of who one is, is no longer in unity with the whole person and needs healing.
The very nature of trauma is to rupture what was once whole. Yet, beyond the physical realm, is the moral injury to the soul. When these symptoms persist long-term, they can have a detrimental impact on a person’s quality of life. Some of these effects include hypervigilance, depression, anxiousness, brain fog, and exhaustion, as well as physiological symptoms like headaches, back pain, digestive problems, etc. Victims of mass violence such as the Boston Marathon bombing commonly experience a range of physical and emotional effects in the immediate aftermath and long term. For almost a decade, working with survivors of mass violence has provided a unique vantage point as a theologically trained trauma professional to speak to the effects of violence on the embodied person. I now manage a national peer support program for survivors of all natural and human caused disaster in the United States.
Eventually, I moved on to become program director providing assistance to survivors coping with the long-term effects of acoustic trauma, traumatic brain injury, and post-traumatic stress disorder. One of the two perpetrators, hiding in a resident’s boat, surrendered while the other was killed in the gunfight.Ī few months after the bombing I was hired under an Antiterrorism Emergency Assistance preparedness grant to provide navigation services and support to approximately five hundred survivors and first responders, including crisis support to families at the federal trial of one of the perpetrators. In a four-day manhunt for the perpetrators, a police officer was killed, an MIT student was taken hostage, and another police officer was nearly killed in a shootout that ended in Watertown Massachusetts, where over three hundred bullets were exchanged. Fifteen spectators in close proximity to the bombs had one or more limbs amputated, and a total of two hundred and sixty-seven people were treated at nearby hospitals. Two pressure cooker bombs were detonated near the finish line by religious extremists, killing three people including an eight-year-old boy. Like most people, I was horrified by what unfolded on the fifteenth of April. Having run the Boston Marathon in the year 2000, I had the television coverage on in the background. Four months earlier, On 15 April 2013, I was living in a small apartment finishing up my thesis on the theology of the body to complete a degree in Theological Studies.
In August of 2013, I began working with survivors and their families impacted by the Boston Marathon Bombing.