‘A deeper sense’: In one interview, he found the story at the heart of a story
A new writer’s reporting put him face to face with a mother whose son had been lost to gun violence. For this episode, he worked with a producer to offer an audio annotation of the interview that informed his report, and that illustrated the mother’s strength and agency.
In 2022, Linda Smith lost her son, Dre’shaun Johnson, to gun violence.
She’s still making sense of what happened to her and her family. Through a lengthy interview, Ms. Smith gave me the privilege of a window into her thinking. That helped inform my story on Purpose Over Pain, a Chicago-based organization that supports people who have had experiences like hers.
I met Ms. Smith in Boston. She had just participated in The Gun Violence Memorial Project, which Purpose Over Pain helped create. The traveling memorial features personal objects contributed by the loved ones of people lost to shootings. But I couldn’t fit much of her story into my report. So I suggested a special episode of our “Why We Wrote This” podcast that I hope offers a deeper sense of how she moves through the world.
I was so moved by Ms. Smith’s generosity and warmth, her agency and love. My aim was to illustrate not just her experience of grief, but also a little more of who she is, and how she has stayed resilient.
Episode transcript
Mackenzie Farkus: Hi, I’m Mackenzie Farkus, a producer here on the Monitor’s “Why We Wrote This” podcast.
This week’s episode is a little different. Rather than having a hosted conversation, we’ve got writer Jacob Posner narrating an interview that he conducted with one of his sources for a recent story he wrote. Jacob covered a nonprofit called Purpose Over Pain, which supports those who have been affected by gun violence. The source, Linda Smith, has given him permission to use the interview in this way.
Jacob Posner: Hi, I’m the Monitor’s Jacob Posner.
It was late September when I got talked into going to an event at Boston City Hall. It was after work. I was tired and it was dark out. I knew it was the opening of a gun violence memorial, and that my best friend’s aunt had played a role in it – but that was all.
But when the night’s speakers got going, I began madly sending emails to myself with fragments of names and dates and ideas because I knew there was something really special happening. Every beat the speakers hit – turning grief into action, moving through deep sadness, healing from trauma – was personal and profound. I thought this was the perfect candidate for that special kind of Monitor story of people making a difference in their communities. It came through clearly in the name of the organization that started it all: Chicago-based Purpose Over Pain. The grassroots organization, started by two mothers who lost their sons in the early 2000s, had approached a design firm that builds memorials about creating a national gun violence memorial. The result was temporary exhibits that have been on display in Chicago, D.C., and now Boston.
At Boston City Hall, I was so struck that these two mothers, who provide grief counseling in Chicago, had brought their healing message all the way here – [beat] to people who, despite living almost a thousand miles away, had experienced the same terrible event: losing a loved one to gun violence.
I’m on “Why We Wrote This” because I want to play you parts of an interview I did with one of the audience members, Linda Smith. She’s the mother of Dre’shaun Johnson, who was shot and killed in 2022. I found her generosity, openness, and love for kids deeply moving, but I couldn’t include everything she told me in the story I wrote. So I decided to put together an audio portrait that I hope illustrates Linda’s resilience.
I met her in Boston City Hall, and we sat near the memorial I first saw in September. It’s a house made of glass bricks, each holding objects representing someone who died by gun violence.
To memorialize Dre’shaun, Linda donated a Red Sox jersey, a chain with a small frame holding his photo, and a baby shoe he once wore. Dre’shaun’s brick is housed at the Institute of Contemporary Art, or ICA, in Boston’s Seaport neighborhood – one of the three locations in the city where these memorials will be displayed until January 2025.
Linda is the kind of person who met staff photographer Melanie Stetson Freeman and me at Boston City Hall despite knowing she would have a very long ride on public transit to get there. She didn’t tell us she lived so far out – her first thought was she didn’t want us to go out of our own way. She’s also the type of person who, when I asked her how she felt seeing her son’s memorial at the ICA, told me about not wanting her grandson to stay too long so he wouldn’t be retraumatized. It would be an understatement to say she puts the needs of others before her own.
On top of that, while clearly struggling with her emotions, she opened up to me about some of the hardest moments in her life. We had a rich and deep conversation, thanks in large part to Mel taking photos for the interview. Mel is an amazing listener and journalist and I think she put both me and Linda at ease with her steady, empathetic presence.
Posner: So he was really silly?
Linda Smith: Silly. Sometimes when you didn’t feel like playing he’d never understand, but he would still make you laugh. But if he don’t feel like playing, because he wasn’t a big morning person, I would say, ‘you are grouchy.’ But then, in less than an hour, then that’s when he wants to laugh and joke and play and then you don’t feel like it, but you end up doing it anyways because he was just so funny.
And my grandson is a lot like him. My daughter called me one day. She said, ‘Ma, guess what Anthony just did? I said, ‘What?’ ‘Knocked over his whole drink at the restaurant.’ Because every time we went out to eat, my son would knock over the water or the juice or whatever and then everyone’s trying to get it. I’m clumsy and he’s - he was clumsy. My daughter is not really clumsy. She’s more serious and likes quiet and we’re noisy – in a good way because I like to have fun with the kids, you know, like, they’re kids, they’re not going to be quiet.
Posner: Dre’shaun, too, really liked kids, and especially liked playing with his nieces and nephews. Linda told me he wanted to be a football coach because he loved kids and his community – he could always be found in the barbershop or neighborhood restaurants.
Posner: So would he play with younger kids a lot –
Smith: – he would play with his –
Posner: – in the family? –
Smith: – all the time. He would throw the ball – and I’m like, let’s take them outside because y’all are going to break something, cause he loved to play with them. And then they get, you know, how kids get, then everybody’s running into each other. They get all happy and they just can’t help their bodies and they’re just all over the place. So he would really get them going, I’m like, ‘let’s get them going to the park’, you know, so they could really have enough room to move their whole body.
Posner: What I really wanted to ask Linda was related to the speakers at the opening of the memorial at Boston City Hall. I could tell that participating in creating this memorial project – contributing objects, seeing their loved ones appear in it, connecting with others who had also participated – helped people heal. I wanted to figure out why, and Linda’s explanation of her activist work in Boston – like speaking at a peace walk for people who lost loved ones to gun violence – helped me understand.
Posner: I’m wondering, you know, you decided to participate in the memorial. How has preserving his memory in this way fit into your grieving process?
Smith: He never leaves my heart or my mind, but me doing positive things is helpful. Because if I’m in the house, you’re just crying, crying – outside you’re in the air. You’re around people.
I don’t like to be the center of attention. I’m always just laid back, and that’s it. But, when that happened to him, I was asked to do a few things and I was like, ‘oh my goodness, how am I going to stand up there and do that.’ But I spoke at the peace walk that just happened in May, on Mother’s Day. I was the lady standing up there giving the speech.
Posner: Since you don’t like to do that sort of thing, why did you decide to do it? What convinced you?
Smith: [Answers immediately] I had to do it for my son.
Posner: Still, the grief remains.
Smith: I always think, like, [her voice breaks] how did this happen to me?
Posner: I’m sorry that it’s coming up for you.
Smith: [Crying] It’s not you, it comes up all the time. Halloween is coming. He loves Halloween. Just everything, when it comes up. My birthday, my daughter’s, my grandson – because I will always count him. I have two children. He just live in heaven. My daughter will be 33 and he’ll be 26, so. One girl and one boy. I had the perfect combo.
I just always think like, did this really happen? Because I’m still in my grieving process. I can’t accept it. I know it’s true but it’s hard to process. And it’s been over two and a half years and I’m still like, you go up and down. But I can’t just say, okay, because I’m not okay. [Her voice breaks] I’ll never be OK.
Posner: Linda knew something was wrong the day her son died two-and-half years ago because he didn’t text or call. Usually, they were in constant touch.
Smith: I’m glad that he couldn’t call me because I wouldn’t want that last memory. What I have is I watched him walk down the hall when he was leaving that morning and he had on all white, all white.
Posner: Is there a way that you think about what stage of grief you’re at?
Smith: I’m just at a standstill. I’m just stuck. I always tell people, when you finally go to sleep, when you’re asleep, you don’t know what happened to you because you sleeping and when I wake up to go to the bathroom or anything, that’s the first thing that pops to my mind and I’m like, my goodness. There you go. You know, all over again, right back at square one. And I don’t sleep no more than like 3 or 4 hours because I have to go to the bathroom and then I go to the bathroom, and then it take me a while to go back down because then I can’t stop thinking about him.
Posner: Linda and her family have done so much to keep Dre’shaun’s name alive. Her niece makes these chains that hold a photo of him, which the family gives out to friends who participated in the Boston Peace Walk. More importantly, it’s helped Linda’s youngest niece, who is only two-years-old and never met Dre’shaun, know who he is.
Posner: Is there anything that helps you?
Smith: Some things is comforting – to just be around family. And we all making sure that the next ones know him also. Two of my nieces was pregnant when this happened to him. And my one little niece is kind of funny because she never met him but she have one of those chains and she say, ‘this is Linda,’ like she know he’s a part of me. And I’m like how this girl know that, like she’s only two years old.
We have posters, pictures, and she knows that I’m always there. And I wear a lot of sweatshirts with his face. And my niece probably says, ‘that’s auntie Linda’s son.’
Posner: Linda has made herself a force of activism. She’s been to a Crime Survivors Walk in Washington. Done the Boston Annual Mother’s Day Walk for Peace for three years. And, partly because her son loved kids, done fundraising dinners for college scholarships and given away backpacks filled with school supplies. She does all of this to keep Dre’shaun’s memory alive, she told me. It’s hard, she says, “but we have to step forward and try to make this community and this world a better place.”
I asked Linda what she hoped visitors to this memorial – visitors, maybe, who had not lost anyone to gun violence – might take away. “I hope they take away how meaningful that memorial is,” she told me, “to people who have been through this kind of trauma.”
Farkus: This special episode of “Why We Wrote This” featuring Jacob Posner’s interview with Linda Smith, was produced by me, Mackenzie Farkus, for The Christian Science Monitor. You can find the story that Jacob wrote using this and other interviews in our show notes. Sound design by Alyssa Britton, and music by Noel Flatt. Produced by The Christian Science Monitor, copyright 2024. Let us know what you think of this special edition of “Why We Wrote This” by emailing us at podcasts@csps.com.
