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"In
memory of
victims"
Boston
Globe They are a large, if quiet, society - the survivors of the murdered. Murder tends to receive a burst of attention, an outpouring of sympathy. After that first flush of concern, the world gradually goes away. But for people like Judy McKie and Betty Borghesani, women whose children were snatched away at a moment's notice, the pain endures after the attention fades. Their quest to make the world remember will take them later this year to an empty plaza on Beacon Hill where the Garden of Peace Memorial will become the first city monument to homicide victims. To make that happen, a group of activists - many of them relatives of victims - has raised $400,000 over the past seven years. The total cost of the planned memorial will be around $1 million, and some of that will come from runners in Monday's Boston Marathon. Through the auspices of a corporate sponsor, the Garden of Peace Memorial was granted 10 slots in the race, which are filled by folks running in memory of loved ones who were killed. They hope to raise $2,500 apiece for the memorial. The marathon idea took hold gradually. ''There was a group of us who were affected by homicide who were interested in doing something,'' explained Borghesani. Borghesani's daughter, Anne, had just turned 23 when she was accosted by a stranger in Arlington, Va. She had moved there after graduating from Tufts and was working as a paralegal, with plans to attend law school. She was to be the guest of honor at a belated birthday party when she was attacked and stabbed. Her assailant had tried to attack another woman earlier that evening. He was arrested five months later stalking yet another woman, knife in hand. Borghesani said her daughter's interest in law and social justice was nurtured, in part, by trips she took to the Soviet Union and to Berlin, which she visited before the Wall came down. ''She wrote us this long letter from Berlin about how awful it was that just because she was an American she had freedom,'' Borghesani said yesterday. ''She was very committed to social justice. She was just a normal, loving, enthusiastic young woman.'' Ground has already been broken on the memorial. The parcel was donated by the state several years ago. It will include a dry riverbed. Each stone at the bottom of the riverbed will commemorate a victim, with his or her name, date of birth, and date of death. The riverbed will lead to a 18-foot-high sculpture of an ibis rising. ''It's meant to be a symbol of hope and a visual statement of the possibility of transcending the violence,'' said Judy McKie, the sculptor who designed it. McKie's son, Jesse, was 21 when he was fatally stabbed in 1990 after leaving a party in Cambridge. His daughter was born four months after he died. McKie knows firsthand the loneliness that can accompany being the survivor of a murder victim. ''For a long time there was very little comfort except in the company of other people who had experienced the same thing,'' she said yesterday. ''They were the only people who knew that pain and felt our pain and understood what we were talking about. ''I'm not the kind of person really comfortable speaking in public or being in politics, but I am an artist. I felt I had to make something.'' Paul Borghesani, Betty's son and Anne's younger brother, will run the marathon Monday, along with his wife. His wife never knew his sister, who died when he was a 20-year-old attending MIT. Now a psychiatry resident in Seattle, he said the process of coming to terms with murder never ends. ''I will
go to the
grave with
this idea
that I had
a sister
who's gone,
who isn't
here, who
should be.'' Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com. This story
ran on page
B1 of the
Boston Globe
on 4/17/2003.
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