The gear from a week spent hiking the Appalachian Trail, rock climbing and mountain biking with her boyfriend was still in her beat-up 2001 Oldsmobile Alero. She left the cafe sometime around noon that day, tired as heck. She knew them by name and took pride in making sure they had a good time, good food and a good jar of homemade jelly to take home for later. She looked forward to serving the regulars. When she wasn’t there, she tended bar at Longhorn Steakhouse or worked as a graduate research assistant.īut the Sunny Side Café was her favorite. In the wee hours of May 1, 2012, Aimee, 24, was waiting tables at the Sunny Side Café in Carrollton, one of three part-time jobs she held to help pay her way through graduate school at the University of West Georgia. Just moving forward.īut the truth is even simpler than that. The easy answer is, that’s just how Aimee Copeland does things. How she’s managed to maintain her optimism and her will to live in the face of such tragedy is hard to fathom. In the four years since the accident, that’s pretty much how Aimee Copeland has managed to rebuild her life.

She licks the tip of her arm, lowers it to touch one of 500 jigsaw pieces, and drops it into place. Aimee has spotted a piece she hadn’t seen before. She stops at a small table where just hours before she and her roommate, Esther, had begun piecing together a jigsaw puzzle of a cat.Įsther offers to take it away to make room for a visitor, but it’s too late. Aimee Copeland steers her wheelchair toward the sitting room in the house that gave her back her independence.Īimee Copeland, pictured here at her Old Fourth Ward home last month, has come a long way since that day in May 2012 when she was injured in a zip line accident and contracted necrotizing fasciitis, an infection commonly called flesh-eating disease.

Snow country novel