Gun violence took their sons. Now these moms help others navigate grief.

Dre’shaun Johnson loved children, especially his nieces and nephews. When he played with them, they jumped and ran all over the place, says his mother, Linda Smith. She recalls sending them outside to Healy Field, a park in Boston’s Roslindale neighborhood, “so they could really have enough room to move their whole body.”

For the past 2 1/2 years in the same park, Ms. Smith has held a back-to-school giveaway of backpacks filled with supplies in her son’s honor. It’s next to the gas station where he was killed in 2022.

Ms. Smith has decided not to resign herself to grief over losing her son to gun violence. She has chosen action instead. She participated in walks honoring others lost to violence. She overcame her shyness to tell her story to large groups. And she parted with cherished items – her son’s baby shoes, a Red Sox T-shirt representing his love of Boston sports – to be included in The Gun Violence Memorial Project. “He never leaves my heart or my mind, but me doing positive things is [more] helpful than sitting in the house,” Ms. Smith says. “In the house, you’re just crying, crying.”

The Gun Violence Memorial Project, a national traveling exhibit that the Chicago-based organization Purpose Over Pain helped create, features personal objects contributed by the loved ones of people lost to gun violence. So far, more than 1,000 lives from 30 U.S. cities have been commemorated in the exhibit, which has previously been displayed in Chicago and Washington, D.C., and is on view at three sites in Boston through Jan. 20.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Linda Smith displays an image of her son, who was killed in 2022.

Purpose Over Pain aims to facilitate healing by offering lifelines to those who are in the depths of grief. Pamela Bosley and Annette Nance-Holt know this grief well. They founded the organization in 2007 after their sons were killed in shootings. They say assisting others – whether mentoring youths, supporting people who have lost loved ones, or raising money to pay funeral costs – has helped them cope with their own traumatic losses.

The inspiration for the memorial project came to Ms. Bosley and Ms. Nance-Holt in 2018 after they traveled to Montgomery, Alabama, and visited the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which commemorates the historical toll of lynching on the United States’ Black population. They then pitched the idea of a national gun violence memorial to Model of Architecture Serving Society Design Group, the Boston-based nonprofit that designed the Alabama memorial. In partnership with Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund and Purpose Over Pain, the design group worked with conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas to bring Ms. Bosley and Ms. Nance-Holt’s vision to life.

Ms. Nance-Holt, who is the fire commissioner in Chicago, says that through the project, “Other people will know who our children were. You might only see a little bit of them, but you will know that they lived, that they were part of society – and that your child is living on in this exhibit.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

The Gun Violence Memorial Project, a temporary traveling exhibit, is on display at Boston City Hall and two other sites in the city through Jan. 20.

“My goal was to help the next mom”

Brooklynn Hitchens, an assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Maryland, says the nature of gun violence in communities complicates the already complex grieving process. Family members often live near the crime scene and must constantly relive difficult memories.

Finding meaning in loss is critical for loved ones dealing with the aftermath of gun violence, which can lead, for example, to severe depression or post-traumatic stress disorder, Professor Hitchens says. “Sometimes that [resilience] comes through activism,” she notes. “They feel like the [loved one’s] life wasn’t in vain. ‘I can do something about it now. I can make sure that his kids have a better life.’”

While The Gun Violence Memorial Project is national in scale, Ms. Bosley and Ms. Nance-Holt also support grieving family members back home in Chicago. This September alone, Purpose Over Pain began helping almost 50 parents affected by gun violence, Ms. Bosley says.

The key to aiding people who have lost someone to gun violence, she notes, is to listen. She never takes over the conversation or offers advice. She makes clear that whatever someone is feeling is OK. And then she waits until the person tells her what they need – whether it’s managing the logistics of memorial services or just helping buy groceries – before springing into action.

After her son Terrell was killed, Ms. Bosley says, “I went through the whole year by myself. And I tried to take my life twice.”

Her grief was so great that she often couldn’t get out of bed. “Just putting my foot on the floor ... was a major step for me, and just smiling and just even eating again,” she says.

All these years later, the grief has stayed with her. But she has learned to channel the force of her sadness into helping others. Through such work, she says, she can avoid disappearing back into depression.

“My goal was to help the next mom,” she says.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Each brick in the exhibit holds mementos contributed by loved ones.

Keeping their names alive

Ruth Henry got to know Dion Emmanuel Taylor while working at a Boston-based nonprofit aimed at reducing violence through arts programming for youths. She says Dion was a photographer, muralist, and poet who advocated for peace through his art.

“He had been way too affected by violence already” for someone age 17, she says. Despite losing his best friend and others, “He still showed up with just a big, beautiful, bright, warm heart and charismatic smile,” she adds.

He was killed in fall 2005, less than half a year after he and Ms. Henry became friends. His family made T-shirts showing one of his murals, which Ms. Henry had helped him create. The mural depicts a large eye with bars and a padlock at its center, and a teardrop reading “freedom.”

A poem he wrote appears on the back of the shirt. The final line reads, “I think violence is hard because everywhere you look, there’s violence.”

In August, with permission from Dion’s family, Ms. Henry donated to the memorial project a picture of Dion and his older sister, the T-shirt with his mural, and his poem printed on a bookmark. The sister, Stacy Ann Taylor, had raised Dion. In grieving Dion’s death, Ms. Henry says, she became close to Ms. Taylor, who died in 2022.

Contributing objects to the memorial project was a powerful experience for Ms. Smith, too. She hoped to help people outside her community understand the impact of gun violence – and how special her son, Dre’shaun Johnson, was. A chain featuring his photo was among the items she donated.

The chain helps Ms. Smith’s 2-year-old niece, who never met Mr. Johnson, feel as if she knows him and what he means to his mother. The toddler points to the chain and says, “‘This is Linda,’” Ms. Smith explains, “like she knows he’s a part of me.”