Surviving and suffering

For the survivors, anniversaries are the toughest days, the times when solace proves most elusive.

They are the times when the living tend to become lost in their memories, when their hard-won peace is threatened.

The Rev. Sandra Cofield-Burris found out just how trying the anniversary of a homicide can be just this past Saturday, one year to the day after her son, Jacques Christo Flowers, was killed outside a bar in Uphams Corner.

She had plans, but they fell through. So she lay in her bed, surrounded by pictures of Jacques, and they had themselves a nice long chat.

''Thank God, I'm a pack rat," she said yesterday in her Brighton apartment. ''I have a million pictures of him. I just stayed in my bed and talked to him and went through a lot of different conversations with him." At 1:32 a.m., his cellphone emitted a short beep. She keeps it close to her, charged, as if he might need it.

Flowers was the 17th homicide victim of 2005. He was shot seven times outside the Dublin House. Boston police did not even release his identity. His mother announced his death herself.

No one has been charged in the case, which, not surprisingly, rankles Cofield-Burris. In a scrapbook, she keeps a letter from the Suffolk district attorney's office. A victims' advocate sent it, introducing herself as the person who would help guide her through the court system. Except that there is no case, so far, to guide her through.

Cofield-Burris said she has pressed the district attorney's office and the police to solve her son's slaying. ''They just wait for someone to come in and tell them who did it," she complained. ''There's no shoe-leather investigation."

Cofield-Burris is an ordained Pentecostal minister, and her faith has seen her through the toughest year of her life. In the months after the shooting, her ministry was placed on hold.

''I couldn't minister to anybody." she said. ''I needed God to minister to me. I was so broken."

From the beginning, the anonymity of her son's death was one of the things that troubled her most deeply. The day after he died, she saw a brief item in the newspaper announcing that there had been a homicide in Dorchester. It also said that Boston police had declined to identify the victim.

''That was my son who died," she said that weekend. ''I want people to know who he was."

Jacques Christo Flowers, 36, was a graphic designer and sometime construction worker. Some of his artwork adorns his mother's living room. There is a poster of the Boston skyline with a lightning bolt above it. Below, it reads, ''The Big Dig -- The costs are shocking." A painting of New York City depicts the Twin Towers. One of his old scrapbooks contains fliers announcing an Andy Warhol exhibit. He was a big Warhol fan. He left three children.

While his mother does not know how he died, she thinks some personal problems were distracting him and he may have been less careful than he normally would have been.

''If he had a heart attack or if he was sick, I could accept that," she said. ''But the brutality of his death, lying on that sidewalk with seven bullet holes in him -- "

There is no recovery from this kind of tragedy. But Cofield-Burris has resumed preaching and is hoping to raise money for a church and family center that would be, in part, a memorial to her son. She believes that justice for her son's killer will come, perhaps not in this life, but surely in the next.

Cofield-Burris is a walking reminder of the often-overlooked survivors of the victims of violence, unnamed, unseen, and uncounted. She lived. She wasn't present at the crime, but she suffers its cruelty every day, living a life utterly transformed.

Still, she believes that her faith will continue to sustain her. She said it's all she has left, that ''only the strong survive."

Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com.