For the love of the children

Oh, how the grandmother loved on that little girl.

Even while Terrez McCleary tried desperately not to drown in her own sorrow, she did everything to fill the void in her granddaughter’s life.

Ghazalah Washington was just 2 when her mother, 21-year-old Tamara Johnson, was shot and killed on Easter in 2009 by a near stranger.

So as much as her grandparents and father could, they shielded Ghazalah from the despair that consumed them.

Dance lessons, swimming lessons, anything to keep her happy. And, sometimes, that meant therapy, too.

But grief and trauma, even among the youngest victims of violence, fix on those voids, settling over hearts and minds with a crushing weight.

Ghazalah yearned for her mother. Sometimes, she’d cry out for her.

When she got older and friends would complain about their moms, she would grow angry; at least they had mothers! She had only the features and mannerisms of a woman she’d barely known stare back at her in the mirror.

Things got worse, though, after Ghazalah, at 12, went to a parole hearing for the man who killed her mother.

In a letter, the girl reminded those deciding the man’s fate that he had not only ended her mother’s life, a young woman who had hoped to be a nurse, but the life she should have shared with her daughter.

For a while, McCleary’s fear that her granddaughter was too young to be at the hearing was overshadowed by her pride at the maturity she showed there.

“I thought she deserved to have a voice since she was most affected than anyone,” McCleary said.

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But then Ghazalah began to withdraw, saying little, eating less.

And McCleary was forced to confront a truth she’d been reluctant to accept: Sooner or later the man who killed her only daughter would be released from prison. He’d be free in a way that her family, her granddaughter, never would be.

“Some parents, when kids ask them about the person who died, some like shut them out and don’t listen to them.”

Ghazalah Washington, 14

McCleary, 53, is a soft-spoken but passionate advocate against gun violence. In 2017, she cofounded Moms Bonded by Grief. Group members meet regularly, their numbers rising alongside the homicides in the city. They support one another and the efforts they take up in hopes of keeping others from joining a group no one wishes to be a part of. Together, they meet with public officials, they attend marches and protests, they establish foundations and scholarships in honor of children they never got to see graduate.

But now McCleary wanted to do more; she had to. Not just for her granddaughter, but for all the children whose encounters with gun violence remained ever-present. For a few days, she’d get them out of Philadelphia.

‘Your pain is normal’

McCleary arrived at the Philadelphia Mills mall parking lot early one August morning with a sleepy and hungry 14-year-old granddaughter and 13-year-old cousin squeezed into a car full of supplies. Bags and boxes overflowed with food and games for the weekend trip to the Kalahari Resorts Waterpark, about 80 miles outside the city in the Pocono Mountains.

The mothers had planned all kinds of activities, including an early Christmas party where the women would transform a drab conference room into a festive holiday celebration. But there would be something else: an opportunity for the children to talk to grief counselors. No adults allowed in their sessions, so they could speak from the heart.

After watching her granddaughter continue to struggle years after her mother’s death, McCleary was determined to give children like her the chance to unload some of the burdens they often carried in silence.

“If these children do not get help, they’re going to self-destruct,” McCleary said. “For someone to violently take your parent from you, it builds up anger.

“I wanted to let them know: Your pain is normal. You’re not alone.”

Even if they chose not to participate in the grief counseling, she at least wanted to show them there was more to life than the violence many of them encountered every day.

‘I don’t think it’s fair’

About 30 children made their way toward the waiting bus; 20 more met them at the waterpark. Some of the youngest pulled tiny roller bags with images of colorful cartoon characters and glittered unicorns. Alongside them the adults wore familiar uniforms: memorial T-shirts and necklaces with the photos of murdered loved ones.

McCleary and the other mothers had planned the long weekend for months. They’d even hosted a gathering at a community garden on Greenway Avenue so the kids could get to know one another before the trip.

That’s where I first met Linwood Bowser, an 11-year-old who confided before boarding the bus that he was a little nervous. He hoped the other kids liked him. He hoped to make some new friends, ones who understood what it felt like to lose so much at such a young age.

Linwood, who goes by Wood, was named after the 20-year-old father he never knew but whose death in 2010 cast a large shadow over his life. Wood wonders what it would have been like if his father were still alive. He worries, a lot, about losing other family members. What would happen to him, he asks, if he lost his mother or his grandmother?

Wood quickly became one of my favorites, a baby-faced sage full of woeful wisdom.

“There are people who are in pain, and they want the world to feel what they feel,” he’d said when I asked him why he thought people picked up guns.

I was both charmed and heartbroken by him. Anguish ages children in such cruel and unfair ways.

When his grandmother recounted the day her son was gunned down across the street from her home, the boy leaned in, trying hard not to look too interested before asking: “So you were there when my father died?”

As his grandmother quietly wept, he slipped his hand into hers and asked nothing more.

Over the course of the weekend, it would become clear that many of the children affected by violence have questions they don’t always ask, painfully protective of the ones most trying to protect them.

“It’s trauma, it’s all trauma,” said McCleary, who in addition to her daughter has lost four uncles, her only brother, and her brother-in-law to gun violence. And then, just this year, a nephew and a cousin.

“This has been a year for us. ... They can’t get over one death before they’re faced with another.”

McCleary was a corrections officer for 15 years, but a couple of years after her daughter was killed, she left the job, unable to be in the same space with those who had inflicted on others the kind of suffering she lived with every day.

“It affects you, your marriage, your livelihood, your career, your health, your mental health, your physical. It affects everything once someone violently takes your child from you,” she said. “It took me years to find myself in a good place.”

Around the time the group was at the resort, an average of three children a week were being shot in Philadelphia, including a 15-year-old girl who was playing basketball outside a city recreation center, and later died. On Aug. 17, she became the 137th child shot this year, one of more than 50 children 18 and younger who were killed in Philadelphia. Just a month later, the city would reach a grim milestone: More than 400 lives lost, mostly to guns.

But that weekend in late August was a temporary respite from all that was and was to come. At that resort, the kids swam and played in the arcade. Some of the teenagers were able to walk around the quiet, grassy grounds on their own, even if they were called back before it got too late. The mothers, too, seemed able to breathe a little easier.

“It’s just nice to get away,” said Sonya Dixon. “To put some distance between you and what’s always weighing you down.” Dixon was there with the 8- and 7-year-old daughters of one of two grandsons she lost to gun violence in just 15 months in 2017 and 2018.

So it was no wonder that when it was time for the children to participate in the grief counseling, a few of the women lingered, ears pressed to the closed door until they heard the sound of laughter on the other side.

There wasn’t a child there who hadn’t suffered multiple losses.

McCleary’s granddaughter and other relatives tried to recount just how many people in their lives had been killed. They had lost friends, cousins, uncles, parents, siblings — at least 10 people among the four teenagers, none of whom was older than 15.

They were sometimes guarded when they spoke, acutely aware of the trauma of others — sometimes even minimizing their losses while sympathizing with others they’d decided suffered more.

“I don’t think it’s fair,” said Alan Williams, 15, whose friend and two cousins were killed. “There’s kids in there that’s like 6, younger than 6. I don’t know who they lost, but why they got to lose them for?”

Like her grandmother, Ghazalah could be reserved, especially around grown-ups. But when asked what adults could do better to help children like them, she didn’t hesitate:

“Listen.”

“Some parents, when kids ask them about the person who died, some like shut them out and don’t listen to them,” she said. “They want to know about them and what happened. That’s how I felt when my mom died and my dad didn’t want to talk about her.

“But then, he’s also going through the pain I’m going through. He lost her, too.”

McCleary, who sat nearby, became emotional. But confronting the hard stuff was the point of the weekend.

At the grief session for the adults, there were even more tears, and admissions of suffocating despair masked behind shows of strength. The traumatized trying to tend to the traumatized.

“We as parents going through this, we barely know how to help ourselves,” said Shonda McClellan, whose 17-year-old daughter, Erica, was killed in 2017.

In a futile attempt to erase the memory of identifying her daughter’s body after she was shot, McClellan had filled her home with photos of her.

“Time doesn’t heal all wounds,” she said. “We’re not strong, we’re broken.”

One woman, who had lost multiple family members, spoke of all the ways she and her family attempted to ease the grief of the children in her family. With love, of course. But also with trips and toys and distractions that always fell short because there are no shortcuts through heartache.

Another woman feared that her 5-year-old grandson was developing an indifference to death. She worried something was wrong with him.

There’s nothing wrong with him, one of the counselors told her. A lot has happened to him.

For a few moments, his words were met with silence as the women considered what he had said, how it cut to the very heart of what they were battling to overcome.

And then the women did what they always do. They wiped their tears, set aside their own anguish, and went to check on the kids.

Now it was time for McCleary to relax and reflect on the weekend that was nearly over.

“I was just hoping all the way up here that the children would feel free and comfortable to talk and just be children and enjoy themselves,” she said. “I think that we’re going to all walk away with a sense of knowing that we would do anything we can to keep our children happy and to get them the help that they need.

“This is just a beginning.”