No Time To Wait A Mother’s Search For Her Adopted Son Brings Her To The Aids Quilt

Last March Cherylee Bomstad traipsed the halls of the old Booth Memorial Hospital in search of memories.

Her mind held fleeting images of a small round face, a wisp of red hair, a baby in her arms.

The dungeon-like halls didn’t look familiar. Bomstad gazed at the long, dark halls, the high ceilings, the exposed pipes. Nothing clicked.

None of the rooms of the old hospital looked familiar either. Until she reached the very last one.

For Bomstad, a red-haired, 48-year-old Spokane nanny, this search held a strange urgency. In the months since her visit to the hospital, now a drug and alcohol treatment center at 3400 W. Garland, she has learned why. There were hard lessons ahead, about the importance of connecting before it is too late, about tolerance.

The last stop on her hospital tour was a large, dark dormitory-style room, with three beds on the left, three on the right and two near the door. She recognized it immediately. Finally her hazy memories of the baby she had relinquished for adoption 28 years earlier were confirmed.

She had stayed in a middle bed. On her left had been her roommate, another teen mother, who had urged Bomstad to hold the baby she’d delivered.

For just 10 or 15 minutes, Bomstad had actually held that little boy. It was long enough to give him a bottle, gaze at the reddish cast in his baby hair, and make a lifelong memory.

Now, gazing again at that room, she knew that she hadn’t imagined holding him. Tears welled in her eyes.

The four walls before her, matching the fragmented images in her brain, were the proof.

It was a triumph over birth-mother’s amnesia. Through the years, as she kept silent about the baby she’d delivered, Bomstad had forgotten the details of the actual birth. Even the date often slipped her mind.

It was Feb. 16, 1968.

She had been 19, a sheltered Catholic girl who hadn’t been allowed to date until she was 18, who had gotten pregnant the very first time she had sex.

She married a year later, gave birth to two more sons, and shoved her memories of her first son back further and further.

Finally, after her 27-year marriage ended in divorce, it was time to recapture a sense of who she was all those elusive years earlier. Time to find her son.

In February Bomstad asked the Children’s Home Society of Washington, which had handled the adoption, to launch the search. The first news sounded promising. The agency’s records showed that he’d made an inquiry himself four years earlier.

Surely that meant he was willing to be contacted, Bomstad told herself.

The Children’s Home Society began to track him down, and Bomstad felt compelled to visit the hospital.

In April, the wispy images in her mind now firm reality, Bomstad visited the Children’s Home Society again. She hoped to finally find her son.

The news, her caseworker warned her, was bad.

Bomstad’s heart sank. Her son didn’t want to see her. She’d known that was a possibility.

The caseworker gently broke the news. It was far worse than that. Matthew Lee Campbell, the baby boy she’d given birth to 28 years ago, had died three years earlier. Of AIDS.

The news was inconceivable. How could he be dead? Bomstad had just begun to search for him.

Throughout the spring, Bomstad’s grief settled in. She grieved the loss of her baby all those years earlier, which she’d never allowed herself to mourn, and now suddenly, she also was grieving his death.

She shed tears of regret, for not having searched earlier, and shame. She’d always been so judgmental about homosexuals. About AIDS. And all along her very own son had been gay, had died too young.

Later in April, Bomstad viewed the exhibit of the AIDS Memorial Quilt at the Spokane Convention Center, and watched a young gay couple holding hands. Her prejudices dissolved into compassion. She wondered if they felt afraid. If her son had felt fear.

“I learned the hard way about judging others,” she said.

Amid the grief, Bomstad also experienced a remarkable new sense of freedom. Breaking free of the lie she’d lived with for years seemed to gradually change her life. She found solace in the truth.

“Not knowing is worse than the worst news,” she said.

The second day of the exhibit she knew she had to make a quilt panel for Matthew.

Through the help of the Children’s Home Society, Bomstad called her son’s adoptive parents. They invited her to stay with them for three days at their home in Glenwood, Wash.

From them, she learned that Matthew had been very bright, had taught himself to read in kindergarten. He’d been an accepting kid, caring, easy to love. He traveled to Europe in high school and served as a page in the state Legislature.

Most important, he’d been raised by a kind, gracious couple who had loved him.

His favorite song lyrics, they said, had come from Garth Brooks: “I could have missed the pain, but I’d have had to miss the dance.”

Bomstad also found out that before he died Matthew had requested that someone sew a panel for the AIDS quilt in his memory.

Members of his adoptive family felt they ought to, but no one had been able to bring themselves to do it.

“I knew I had to make a quilt panel,” Bomstad said. “Not that I should, but that I had to.”

She wrote a simple, rhyming poem about her loss and asked Kinko’s to copy it on fabric. She framed the poem on a 3-by-6-foot piece of cloth. She added her son’s graduation photo and his name, “Matthew Lee Campbell.”

“It was the only thing I could give him,” Bomstad said recently, tears filling her eyes.

This week Bomstad will leave Spokane on an extended trip across the United States. In October, she will view the AIDS quilt which will be displayed on the National Mall. Its 40,000 panels, the length of 19 football fields, will extend from the Capitol Building to the Washington Monument.

Bomstad will be there, the proud birth mother at last, with a message about love and tolerance, and the importance of making connections before it’s too late.

She hopes other birth mothers and adopted children will hear her story and search one another out while they still have time.

“The only path for me,” she wrote in her AIDS quilt poem, “is spreading the truth while accepting the grief.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo