(NECN: Ally Donnelly) - Sitting in her parents South Boston home, tears roll down Kimberly Connolly's face.
"I know that my kids used to go to bed happy and I know yesterday I brought my daughters to a trauma counselor," she said. "And they had no trauma before that."
Connolly keeps her daughters - 11-year-old Makinley and 4-year-old Haleigh - close. The sisters went with their mom and grandparents to cheer on Auntie Keryn as she fulfilled her dream of running the Boston Marathon.
The kids' grandmother, Michelle Connolly, said, "All of a sudden it just -- it was just such an explosion and the noise and immediately I thought like a speaker blew something like that. I remember my sunglasses and my phone just blew off of my -- I just remember them being gone and I went like this and I remember, Oh my God, my head."
Fifty-two-year-old Michelle scrambled to her feet, desperate to find her family. She was separated from the larger group so didn't know that granddaughter Makinley was missing, but Makinley's mother went cold with terror.
"Sheer panic, panic, sheer panic, but I was calm because I needed to find her," Kimberly said.
Kimberly did find the petrified little girl and put her kids in the arms of a friend and told them to run while she tried to find her mother, still separated from the larger group as the second bomb went off. Michelle will never get the sound and smell out of her head.
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"Horrible smell, horrible smell," she said. "It was sulfur. It sounded like both ears just kind of go and you kind of pull yourself in because you just can't imagine. I've never heard anything like it."
Michelle Connolly was dragged to safety and eventually taken to Carney Hospital in Dorchester. She has bumps and bruises all over her body, suffered a concussion and white hot shrapnel seared into her face. Though she was treated and released last week, she was desperate to have the pieces of BBs and ball bearings surgically removed as soon as doctors could take her.
"I knew I had to have it out of my face. I had to have it out of my body," she said. "Because that was a piece of evil that somebody made to hurt and maim and kill people -- even sleeping with that was a difficult thing for me."
Though they all know how blessed they are to have not been more seriously injured, sleep has not come easily to *anyone in this tight-knit family. Connolly wakes with nightmares and jumps at loud noises -- daughter Keryn is filled with heartbreak for the victims and rage and resentment for her own dreams unfulfilled.
"I anticipated that feeling of the finish line and the whole Boston experience you know?" Keryn Connolly said. "and it just got taken away really fast."
So much has been taken away from the Connollys -- security, safety -- a sense that family could always make everything alright -- even in the face of terrorists bent on evil.
"How could they hate people so much to do something like that? How does this happen?" Michelle wondered.
The Connollys haven't figured out how just yet, but insist they will get through this, and though Keryn initially worried about the effect watching the Marathon again might have on them, she says she will run again next year.
