Philadelphia’s gun violence took their children. Now they are giving the city a healing garden.

In a long-vacant lot in Southwest Philadelphia, Terrez McCleary looked out over the land where she and other mothers had just planted nearly a dozen trees.

Overhead, she saw an angel in the sky and knew they had secured the right spot.

The celestial-looking cloud formation, brought to life in the afternoon sun, was all the sign McCleary needed: A garden dedicated to Philadelphia’s victims of gun violence was where it should be, and those memorialized here would be looked after when the mothers weren’t tending to the space.

“We’ve been trying to make this happen for so long,” said McCleary, whose 21-year-old daughter, Tamara Johnson, was shot and killed on Easter in 2009.

“So seeing that felt like confirmation that we were doing the right thing.”

The Moms Bonded By Grief Botanical Garden of Healing broke ground on Saturday near the corner of 51st Street and Woodland Avenue.

Planting the trees, donated by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, was the first step of a dream sown by a small group of mothers whose impact and outreach I’ve watched grow alongside the number of homicides in the city.

What started in 2017 as a support group for mothers mourning the loss of their children has turned into citywide efforts that include advocacy and activism, foundations and scholarships — and, since 2021, a yearly retreat for children impacted by gun violence.

Now, the group is building this garden — which they hope will grow into a place where people can remember those who lost their lives to guns and help heal those left behind to mourn them. Even as the number of homicides has begun to decrease, the fellowship of families impacted by gun violence in our city only grows.

Philadelphia isn’t the only city with such a monument. In 2022, several of the women traveled to some of my old stomping grounds in New Haven, Conn., to tour a permanent memorial to victims of gun violence.

I called Marlene Miller-Pratt, who led the effort to establish the New Haven Botanical Garden of Healing Dedicated to Victims of Gun Violence. As we talked, she said she still remembers what one of the Philly mothers said as she walked down a brick pathway lined with the names of victims in a city that counted 14 homicides that year.

“We would need five of these paths for one year,” said Danielle Shaw-Oglesby. Her 23-year-old daughter, Dominique, was one of the city’s 303 homicide victims in 2018.

It was a disturbing observation, but Miller-Pratt, whose 20-year-old son was killed in New Haven in 1998, encouraged the women to sit and sketch out their vision for a place that might bring them, and their community, some peace.

What they dreamed up is a poignant space of reflection on a lot that will eventually house a new Evelyn Graves Ministries Church, though Pastor Cassandra Graves said the garden will always have a home there.

It seems a perfect fit. Graves’ mother, Evelyn Graves, founded the church in the 1970s, along with a drama production company and a private Christian school. In those early years, she worked to quell Philadelphia’s gang violence. She died in 2022.

“It was emotional,” Cassandra Graves said of the groundbreaking, noting that the space has been used for all kinds of events over the years, from carnivals to religious revivals.

“I’m proud that our church’s legacy lives on with resources for the community.”

Eventually, McCleary hopes the group can raise enough money to erect a permanent wall with remembrances of victims, along with poems and other encouraging words. But before that, the group wants to enclose the garden with a fence to deter vandalism, though Miller-Pratt, from Connecticut, said no one has ever touched their garden.

I would hope for the same reverence and respect in Philly. But once the fence is up, the group plans to install benches created from trees from Bartram’s Garden, and spread thousands of river rocks etched with victims’ names and ages, a detail meant to serve as a reminder of the weight of death.

“I hope it becomes a place where people touched by gun violence can find some healing,” McCleary said. “But I also hope it becomes a place where people can come and see, and feel, the impact of gun violence on all of us — and help us make it stop.”

When she sent me a picture of the sky, with the angelic-looking cloudscape seemingly settled over the mothers, I told her I saw what she saw.

What I didn’t tell her is that I see angels everywhere in the city — in her and her fellow moms bonded by grief, in men, women, and children who have suffered the worst kinds of loss, but who choose every day to use their pain as a lifeline to help others to hope. And perhaps, one day, to heal.