Grieving Mother Shares Power of Memories

The bullet that tore through her son’s head one summer night divided Camille Bodden’s life in two: Abby, and after Abby.

Once she had a boy who hated homework and loved digging worms. Once she had a teen who drank milk and left the empty carton in the refrigerator. Once she had a proud young man with a purpose, studying economics at college.

Now she has memories--and a mission. After her son died at 24, Camille Bodden embraced a new family: survivors of murder victims. In newspaper columns, at churches and schools, she reaches out to others steeped in sorrow, sharing the power of memories to heal, to comfort, even to reach into death and pull out life.

At a memorial in a Brooklyn church, the names are read aloud, one by one like slow drumbeats.

Abby Bodden. Shot.

Juan Sanchez. Shot.

Andrew Marti. Strangled.

Outside the Oratory Church at St. Boniface, the scent of blossoms fills the sunny afternoon. Inside, behind stained-glass windows, Camille Bodden sits with others whose lives have been shattered by violence.

Denise Louise Ritts. Stabbed.

Efrain Rios Olivo. Beaten.

Baby Henry Tysawn Showard. Suffocated.

The names go on, 52 in all. Candles flicker in trembling hands. Camille Bodden’s flame goes out, extinguished by her tears. From a photograph in a tiny frame on her lapel, Abby is smiling.

“Death comes so suddenly, and at first, you’re pregnant with grief,” she says. “But then you roll back that tombstone, and it becomes a womb, and you give birth to the strength and courage to help others.”

Abby was born in 1971, Abdul Malik Bodden. His mother’s diary records his first stirrings when she was pregnant with her seventh and final child. The doctor heard the heartbeat, she wrote. “Baby is kicking nicely.”

For the seventh birthday of “my sweet baby boy,” she wrote: “We sang and cut the cake.”

As a teenager, Abby fished with his best friend, Mario. At the State University at Buffalo, he lived in an apartment and studied economics, still managing to write to his mother in Queens. In a letter he never had the chance to mail, he told her: “I want you to live long so I’ll have at least one person in my corner.”

He phoned her one day in July 1995, and his last words were, “I love you, Mama.”

A few nights later, on July 20, Abby was sitting in a friend’s double-parked car in Buffalo. Another young man, a stranger, pulled up and started taunting Abby, mistaking him for someone he had argued with earlier.

Abby and his friends drove off. When he got out of the car in front of his apartment, shots pierced the night, and a bullet ripped through the back of Abby’s head.

His mother, a nurse, rushed to the hospital where her son lay dying. During the vigil she kept by his beeping monitors and breathing tubes, she wrote in her journal, her crisp professional jargon crumbling beneath reality.

5 a.m.: “Abdul’s progress. Herniated brain stem, function depressed.”

3 p.m.: “Check patient’s breathing without support. . . . Heart stop, CPR given, brought back. . . . Clinically brain dead, likely.”

4 p.m.: “No life left in my baby. God took him home.”

Abby’s murderer was caught, convicted and sent to prison. The headlines faded. But the case is never closed for those who love a soul stolen by murder.

At the Brooklyn memorial on a recent Sunday, some mourners had lost loved ones just a week earlier; others, as long ago as 1980. In their struggle, they were equals, listening as Sister Camille D’Arienzo invoked the story of Lazarus, who rose from the dead after the stone of his tomb was rolled away.

“Sometimes mourners put a stone on the entrance of their own hearts,” said Sister D’Arienzo, a Roman Catholic nun. “Sometimes behind the stone are grief, anger, hatred, desire for vengeance. Sometimes what is locked behind the stone is ourselves, who can’t let go of the dead to love the living.”

Camille Bodden is a member of the Cherish Life Circle, which Sister D’Arienzo started five years ago to oppose the death penalty and support victims’ families. The group, backed by the nun’s Sisters of Mercy order in Brooklyn, organized the service.

Bodden, 57, also spreads comfort on her own through counseling, writing and speaking. A nursing professor at Queensborough Community College, she applies her teaching skills to a new curriculum of grief.

She recently addressed an auditorium of sixth- and seventh-graders. A gregarious woman slightly over 5 feet tall, she held their rapt attention with stories of life and death, despair and hope. Afterward, they leafed through her diaries, looking for memories of Abby.

Part of her message is public and political. She notes that of the 52 victims named at the service in Brooklyn, 40 were shot to death, some of them with weapons illegally purchased.

“I’m outraged at the ease with which people are able to buy guns,” Bodden says.

But the real power of her message is personal.

“People die in more ways than physically,” she says. “If I’m able to help people emotionally, that’s my mission now. There are many ways to help people live.”

She teaches by example. One moment, she will share the saddest of memories. The next, her eyes will crease into an infectious smile, and she’ll laugh at how her mind plays games with echoes of Abby.

She has heard her son come to life in a bird outside her window, a crow calling “Maaah, maaah.” Suddenly Abby was there. Another day at a diner in Queens, she glanced at a young man in the doorway. It was Abby again.

In a column in the Tablet, a New York-based Catholic weekly, she wrote that she thought of Abby’s last breaths while visiting a woman dying of cancer:

“This silent sharing from my heart allowed me to look beyond the physical pain of dying and find beauty within the waning breaths of her life. When we look at a beautiful sunrise, the beauty of nature, the beauty of a little baby, the desert will blossom and spring forth with such brilliance.”

Abby also helped her reach the schoolchildren in the auditorium.

“Some may want to be rich and famous when they grow up. And then they hear the struggle of a mom who is able to turn something horrendous into a positive expression of love,” she says.

“Then I say, ‘I want to hear now what you want to be when you grow up.’ I hope they want to become loving, caring and not concerned about money, fame. I’m adopting every child as a replacement for my son.”

She is ready for the next step in her journey of grief: To look someday into the eyes of the man who killed her son.

His name is Mario Zanghi, and he is 28, the same age Abby would have been. A career criminal who was on parole for robbery when he shot Abby, he is eligible for parole again in 2024.

He has not repented.

“But I’m praying for him. I still believe there is a soul there,” Bodden said. “I have to say to myself, never turn my back on this expectant soul, the murderer, just because he is a body that took a life.”

Her son left her the fledgling business he ran, Abdul Malik’s Incense & Oils, which Bodden keeps going from her garage in Queens.

“Abby must be laughing in heaven, because I didn’t like him making incense at home. Every coffee cup and milk glass and fork, even the toilet paper, smelled like Egyptian musk or jasmine.”

Four years after Abby died, his mother grows philosophical at times. Birth and death “are just flip sides of the same coin,” she will say. But other moments reveal the precarious nature of life after murder.

Abby left a daughter, 5-year-old Ameenah. One day Bodden took her to Long Island so she could play on the beach, not far from the cemetery where Abby lies under a granite stone in a grassy field.

Ameenah’s laughter bounced across the sand, so much like her father’s. Tears welled up in Bodden’s eyes behind sunglasses as she watched the girl collecting shells.

Her granddaughter wanted to build a sand castle; they came upon one already made. And Abby was there again:

“I told her that her daddy did that for her.”