For several years after her son was murdered on a Baltimore street in 1993, Yong Cha Jones wrestled with a despair so powerful that she wasn’t certain she would survive.

Even as she fought tirelessly to have her son’s killer brought to justice, which finally happened in 1998, her sorrows continued to mount. Her parents and her husband died of heart attacks within three years of one another. To this day, Jones believes each was the victim of a broken heart.

“When my son was killed, time passed without me,” Jones said at her home in Bangor on Sunday, Mother’s Day. “I was like a zombie. When my husband and I buried our son, we buried our dreams with him. I did not feel I was in the land of the living anymore.”

Today, at the University of Maine, Jones will announce the creation of a scholarship fund in memory of her son, a 1992 University of Maine graduate who was about to begin his graduate studies in child psychology at Johns Hopkins University when he was randomly robbed for drug money and shot in the face. The Laurence A. Jones, Jr. Scholarship, established with the University of Maine Foundation, will be awarded annually to Maine high school graduates who are second- or third-year psychology majors at the university.

The scholarship is modest, about $1,000, but it carries with it a significance greater than its recipients will ever be able to appreciate fully. For Jones, a mother who has grieved for more than eight years, this humble gift to others in her son’s memory may also be the greatest gift she could give to herself.

“His spirit can live on now,” she said as she wiped away her tears. “I feel completeness, now that the mother’s task is done.”

Jones, a native of Korea who moved to Bangor in 1975 with her American husband, an Air Force man, dismisses those who say they admire her extraordinary strength of character, her ability to endure a sadness that might have broken a weaker person. Jones insisted it was not her strength that made her lobby politicians from Maine to Maryland for three years to find her son’s killer. It was not her strength, she said, that caused her to gather the signatures of 1,600 Maine supporters on a petition urging the Baltimore police to make her son’s murder – one of about 350 homicides in the city that year – a priority. And it was not her strength alone that allowed her to sit in that Baltimore courtroom in 1998 for the trial that ultimately sent James Langhorne to prison for life.

“I came to America when I was 25,” Jones said. “I had survived the Korean War as a child, the fighting in Inchon, and I saw such terrible things. In Korean culture, I was taught that the souls of any young, unmarried people who die of violence cannot rest in peace until the perpetrator is brought to justice. I was the mother, and I could not let that happen to my son. It was not strength, no. It was my duty to let his soul rest.”

Jones continues to go each day to the family plot at Mount Hope Cemetery to speak to her loved ones. She always wears a picture of her son, who would have turned 33 today, in a locket around her neck. And there are still those weekends when she expects her beloved “Junior” to call, as he did every weekend when he went off to college. That’s when she opens the notepad and reads, over and over, the advice she wrote to herself – that she must let go, at last, if she is to heal and join the land of the living again.

Finally, so many painful years later, she is beginning to believe it can happen.

“My son loved children, and wanted to pursue his education so he could help them one day,” Jones said. “The scholarship is a fitting tribute to his memory by helping others do what my son would have done. I can’t say it’s a happy feeling for me, but it is a good feeling. I don’t know if I deserve this feeling, but it does not go away. It keeps coming back to me. I’ve done what I had to do. My mother’s job is complete.”