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.”

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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 emotional recovery that could last a lifetime.

Betty Forsyth, 94, was on a stroll and had stopped on her way back home to feed the birds and squirrels. Her walker was found on the sidewalk.

“When I think of Betty, I don’t really think about the tragedy of how she died,” said her close friend Maureen Williams. “I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the man who did this.”

As Williams sorted through Forsyth’s belongings and saved treasured keepsakes for her family, she discovered new things about her longtime friend. Forsyth had a lifelong love of dogs. She turned that into a career starting as a kennel maid for an English aristocrat and later became an award-winning poodle breeder — accomplishments proudly laid out in a scrapbook Williams found.

Her nephew, Rob Forsyth, 62, has been clinging to memories of monthly family dinners and trips to the casino. He still has to remind himself his aunt is gone.

His greatest regret is not taking time to document his aunt’s recollections of their family history in England, where she was born.

“I waited too late to ask,” he said. “Her generation is gone. She was the last one.”

Munir Najjar, 85, was also out for a walk. He and his wife Lillian were on vacation from Amman, Jordan, visiting the families of their grown children on their second visit to Canada.

“On the day before the accident, my sister and her family took my parents to Edwards Gardens,” Najjar’s son Omar said. “He was thrilled with every tree he saw, with every flower, every bird.”

They hope to one day have a memorial for Munir there.

“He was thrilled to be alive and to be part of this beautiful place,” Omar said.

The memories shared by friends and family about the former English teacher have provided solace in a year of grief, Omar said.

The family brought Munir back to Jordan to be buried. His tombstone reads, “He brought love wherever he went,” Omar said.

“The past year has been hard to say the least,” he said. “My family has not lost sight however of the many other families who have suffered due to this act of terror. They continue to be in our prayers.”

They pray too for the alleged driver, even as they reckon with how to live in a world where there are people “who do not know love and are sadly filled with hate for their fellow humans.”

Of the 10 people killed on April 23, 2018, Ji Hun Kim and So He Chung were the youngest. The 22-year-olds were post-secondary students — Kim at Seneca College and Chung at the University of Toronto.

Anne Marie D’Amico would have been 31 last December — an occasion instead marked by the launch of a foundation in her name to end violence against women.

The family of Andrea Bradden, 33, had remained private about their loss, felt deeply in the city’s Slovenian community.

Chul Min (Eddie) Kang, 45, worked at a restaurant in the area and was about to embark on a new stage in life when he was killed.

Renuka Amarasingha, 45, was a single mother to a 7-year-old son and had just started work at a school in the Willowdale neighbourhood.

Beloved grandmother Dorothy Sewell, 80, is remembered for her sunny attitude.

Geraldine (Gerry) Brady, 83, was a great-grandmother, always decked out in dazzling colours.

Sixteen people, including Catherine Riddell and Aleksandra Kozhevnikova, were injured in the attack.

Kozhevnikova, 91, prided herself on her health and independence. She was walking back from the bank and the grocery store when she was run down. She is now in a wheelchair and is dependent on caregivers and weekly treatments from a chiropractor to function.

“I went through a lot of things in my life, but I haven’t experienced worse than this, even after going through the war,” Kozhevnikova said through a Russian translator in an interview at her modest Yonge St. apartment where a massage table leans against the living room wall and an adjustable hospital bed sits in her small bedroom.

“Pain, pain, pain,” she said with a grimace. “There is not a single part of my body that doesn’t experience constant pain.”

Kozhevnikova struggles with stints of hazy memory but had no hesitation when stating the exact date she was hit. In fact, she has been counting down the days to the one year anniversary.

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She intends to face it with a positive attitude.

She has continued to use the stretch of sidewalk where the attack happened, even though a caregiver must push her along in a wheelchair.

“I have no fear,” she said of being outside. “Things happen in life. It’s important to get over it and continue with life.”

Though her daily reality is changed forever, her sense of style has not.

Lately, Kozhevnikova has been enjoying trying on new clothes gifted to her by friends and relatives.

“I’m trying to dress better and be fashionable,” she said with a chuckle.

Catherine Riddell has chosen to be indomitably cheerful in the face of what has been the worst year of her life.

“It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to deal with,” she said. “Mostly because it affected my family badly. It was hard for me to see them so upset.”

But, she said, firmly: “There is no way that I’m going to let it take me down.”

Riddell, who competed as a Canadian Paralympic cross-country skier between 1980 and 1986, had almost fully recovered from her third knee-replacement surgery when she was hit. There are no more 60-kilometre walks to raise funds to fight cancer in her future. But there may yet be a five-kilometre one.

“I may not ever be the way I was before, but I will be damn close,” Riddell said. She had been forced to use a walker, “now I’m trying to transition to having confidence walking with a cane,” she said. “The ultimate goal is to get back to walking with nothing.”

In order to give her physical recovery the single-minded focus it has required for her be able to live independently, she has had to push aside the roiling emotions and questions she struggles with.

The sickening and sometimes guilty feeling she gets when she thinks about what happened has not gone away.

“I don’t know how I survived and so many people died,” she said. “I give thanks because I could have been dead … There is a reason why it didn’t happen.”

It took a long time for her to truly grasp the magnitude of the carnage, in part because she has almost no memory of what happened. One minute she was walking down the street, on the way to the pharmacy, the next she was in a hospital bed.

When she finally understood, it made her feel sick to her core.

“It’s heartbreaking to think of those lives lost,” she said.

She wants her resilience and positivity to reflect the strength her fellow Torontonians have shown in the face of a horrific act and help in reclaiming a sense of community.

“You can’t let something like this scare you from going out and do things,” she said. “You can’t let it freeze you up.”

On the anniversary of the attack, the city is planning a community vigil at the Mel Lastman Square amphitheatre. It’s also planning to consult with survivors, bereaved families and impacted communities on a permanent memorial.

Anna Kozina, a psychotherapist specializing in treating post-traumatic stress disorder, has spent some of the past year supporting those affected. Having a space for community mourning and healing and an opportunity for those who live and work in the area to restore their sense of safety in the world is a necessary part of recovery, she said.

Kozina says it’s important to separate what you can control and what you can’t — and to seek professional help if intrusive thoughts linger.

“The key thing is to find the sense of safety within your self. Walk on the streets and see the trees and the cars going by and people walking past and know that you are safe in this moment,” she said. “Human connection and seeing smiles and other people in the present moment, it is quite self-soothing to our nervous system. That is how we rewire our brains out of danger.”

The trial of the alleged killer Alek Minassian is scheduled for February 2020, with some pretrial motions set to start over the summer. As Riddell continues her physical recovery, the upcoming court case looms over her emotional recovery and her own attempts to grapple with how something so terrible could happen.

She says she doesn’t harbour any hate towards the alleged van driver and is determined to face him court when that day comes.

“I want to be face-to-face with him. I want him to know he didn’t win,” she said.

Her feelings toward him are a complicated mix of compassion and anger.

“I feel he’s in need of help for mental health,” she said, letting out a sigh. “At the same time, I can’t forgive him for what he has done. He traumatized this whole city.”

She will continue to hope for an explanation for why the attack happened.

“Everybody went through an awful lot,” she said. “I really would like to understand why, but I don’t know if we will ever know the truth.”