For two years, Holly Shearer and Benjamin Hulleberg parked in the same garage. They rode the same elevators. She finished her shift at the heart center just as he arrived for his in the neonatal intensive care unit, one floor and one hallway away. They passed each other in the women’s pavilion of St. Mark’s Hospital in Salt Lake City, a mother and the son she had given up, close enough to brush shoulders, and neither of them knew.
A decision made at fifteen
In 2001, Holly Shearer was a fifteen year old girl in Utah with a positive pregnancy test and no map for what came next. By her fifth month, she had made the hardest decision of her life. She would place her baby for adoption, but she would choose the family herself.
She sat with the files and read them one by one until she found Brian and Angela Hulleberg, a couple who had been struggling with infertility and aching for a child. Holly gave birth to a boy. The Hullebergs named him Benjamin. He was placed in their arms during Thanksgiving week, November 2001.
When I handed Benjamin to them, it was the hardest decision I have ever had to make.
Holly Shearer
It was a closed adoption, but not a cold one. Angela had promised to write, and she kept that promise. A letter every week, and photographs. For three years, Thursday was the best day of Holly’s week, because Thursday was the day she could pick up the pictures and see what her son had been doing.
And then, the way these arrangements so often do, the letters slowed and stopped. In 2014 the adoption agency itself closed. The thread went quiet.
Twenty years of looking in the wrong places
Benjamin grew up knowing he was adopted, and knowing his birth mother’s first name: Holly. It was never a secret and never a wound. His parents spoke about her with gratitude, and he absorbed that gratitude as his own.
But knowing a first name is not the same as knowing a person. As he got older, Benjamin started searching in earnest. He wrote letters. He registered with an adoption registry. He took a DNA test and waited for a match that never came. By the time he turned twenty, he had quietly begun to give up a little.
What he did not know was that Holly had already found him. She had located his social media page when he was eighteen, and then stopped short.
He had so much going on in his life. The last thing I wanted to do was throw a wrench in his life. So I just watched from a distance.
Holly Shearer
She watched for two years. He searched for two years. Neither one moved.
The message
On 19 November 2021, Benjamin’s twentieth birthday, Holly finally typed the message.
Benjamin was at work when it arrived. He remembers the exact spot on the floor, the exact machine he was standing at, the gap between hourly quality checks when he glanced at his phone. A stranger had messaged him. He replied without knowing who she was.
Then she explained.
It hit me like a load of bricks. This was a day I had been waiting for the past twenty years of my life, and to imagine it was finally happening was outrageous.
Benjamin Hulleberg
He did not want to wait. He asked to meet immediately, which startled Holly a little, and a dinner was arranged almost at once. A table at a Red Robin, both families, twenty years compressed into one evening.
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Holly arrived first and sat with Angela and Brian. Five minutes after they sat down, someone tapped her on the shoulder. She turned around, and there he was.
“Joy just overflowed me,” she said. “We just sat hugging for about five minutes and crying.”
Benjamin’s version is shorter. “I just looked at her and I was like, you are real, you are in front of me.”
The dinner ran more than three hours.
The detail no one saw coming
It was somewhere in those three hours that the conversation turned to work, and the room went still.
Holly Shearer was a medical assistant at The Heart Center at St. Mark’s Hospital. Benjamin Hulleberg volunteered in the newborn intensive care unit at St. Mark’s Hospital. They had both been there for two years.
“I would come to my shift right as she was leaving hers,” Benjamin realised. “We probably passed each other a few times in the parking garage, in the women’s pavilion.”
“It would have been crazy to think that we rode up in the elevator together and had no idea,” Holly said.
There is something almost unbearably tender about the geometry of it. A woman who gave up a baby ended up working in a building where she walked past the newborn ICU every morning on her way in. Her son, who had been that baby, chose to spend his free hours holding other people’s newborns in that same unit. Both of them said they had felt drawn to that hospital. Neither could explain why.
What came after
Benjamin has since met his younger half brother and half sister. He stops by Holly’s office at least once a week, and they have coffee before his NICU shift. He calls her mom too, the word stretched rather than transferred. Angela, his mother, put it plainly: “Benjamin is super lucky to have all of these people in his life that love him.”
Holly’s summary is four words long. “My heart is full.”
And Benjamin, asked what he would say to everyone still searching, said this: “Do not give up hope. I felt like I was at a point where I had given up just a little. I had tried so many things and they just had not worked. It came when I was least expecting it.”
Then he added the part that explains why this story travels so far, so fast, every time it resurfaces online.
There was a little hole in me that I did not know about, and finding them really filled that in. I feel very whole. I feel very complete.
Benjamin Hulleberg