Three months after she was nearly killed when a man drove a rented van into a sea of pedestrians at a busy North York intersection, Catherine Riddell took her first post-injury walk down a public sidewalk.She chose to go from her Finch Ave. apartment down to Yonge St. just as she’d done on the sunny afternoon of April 23, 2018. She went alone. She had to do it by herself, she said, and she just wanted to get it over with. “I was very cautious of vehicles, for the first little while,” she recounted, suddenly bursting into laughter — her way of coping with a long year of pain, anger, grief and frustration. Each step for the 68-year-old legally blind former Paralympian was slower than before, aided by the cane she now uses. It took eight weeks in the hospital and a gruelling physiotherapy regimen for the damage to her spine, pelvis and ribs to heal enough for her to be walking at all.She stopped near where she was thrown against a bus shelter by the force of the van. She expected to be overwhelmed with emotion.“I waited to see if anything was going to come back to me or if I was going to start feeling nervous,” she said. “Surprisingly, I was OK. Maybe it’s because I have no memory of it.”By the end of the walk, she simply felt relief. “That’s my neighbourhood,” she said. “I was born in this area. There is no way that I’m going to let him ruin my life.”A year has passed since the worst mass killing in Toronto’s recent history, but for friends and family of the 10 dead it has felt both like an eternity and no time at all. A nephew is still jolted by the realization his aunt is gone. A son’s grief is shadowed by questions not yet answered: Why would someone commit an act of such violence? What will happen to him?Those same questions haunt two women who were seriously injured. For them, the past year has been a fight to regain their independence through a physical and ...
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