Philadelphia is creating a pop-up garden to memorialize thousands of overdose victims

In the months after Tyler Cordeiro died of an overdose in Philadelphia, his mother, Susan Ousterman, struggled with how to memorialize her kind, passionate boy — who muscled past anxiety to introduce himself to new kids in his class and invited friends without families home to celebrate Christmas.

The Bucks County mother landed on the idea of a memorial garden where parents like her could find solace with their families “surrounded in natural life.”

“I didn’t want him in a cemetery alone,” Ousterman said. “After speaking with several other people that had lost children, it was a common theme. I felt like there needed to be a place to really celebrate who they were.”

Tyler, who was 24 when he died, was one of a staggering 1,214 people who died of overdoses in the city in 2020, and the crisis has only escalated during the pandemic. While the city is still finalizing data from 2021, state data indicate that at least 1,274 people died of overdoses last year, the highest toll on record.

» READ MORE: Philadelphians who died of a drug overdose often had sought help for addiction, report finds

Since her son’s death, Ousterman has been working to fund and identify a permanent location for a garden. In the meantime, though, she mentioned the idea to Laura Vargas, a program manager in Philadelphia’s Substance Use Prevention and Harm Reduction program, who has been running bereavement groups for people who have lost loved ones to overdoses in Philadelphia.

They decided to start with a memorial effort that will launch online Aug. 1, then at the end of the month with a pop-up garden in Center City outside of the Municipal Services Building on John F. Kennedy Boulevard. The garden will open on Aug. 31, which is International Overdose Awareness and Memorial Day.

Over the next month, people who have lost loved ones in the Philadelphia area can fill out a form to have their relatives or friends included in the memorial. Participants can choose whether they’d like their loved ones to be honored on the virtual memorial, on a tagged flower in the memorial garden, or in both spaces.

The garden will be open through Sept. 30, from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday, and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. People who are recovering from drug addiction will serve as the garden’s staff — engaging visitors, sharing their stories, and keeping an eye on the garden. The city plans to host programs related to overdose awareness there throughout the month, Vargas said.

The city is also hoping to engage people without a personal connection to the overdose crisis. “A lot of people will probably stumble upon it and start learning,” Vargas said. “We’re hoping to increase public awareness and decrease stigma.”

The garden is the first city-supported memorial of its kind. Ousterman hopes it will spur momentum for more permanent gardens, in the Philadelphia region and around the country.

» READ MORE: Family members of Philly’s overdose victims find solace in a city-run bereavement group

Ousterman is one of dozens of parents and loved ones of overdose victims who have participated in Vargas’ bereavement services for survivors. She and many parents in the groups have turned to advocacy in the wake of their children’s deaths.

Recently, she has been advocating for statewide policies like legalizing syringe exchanges in Pennsylvania — in the last year of her son’s life, he contracted endocarditis, a life-threatening inflammation of the lining of the heart, because he could not access sterile syringes.

“Preventing this from happening to other families — it’s about the closest thing to relief from the grief,” she said, adding that people who have lost children to overdoses may also find comfort in connecting with each other.

“[We] walk around this life feeling homesick,” she said. “When we’re with each other, we feel that unnatural, uneasy feeling goes away.”