Mixed emotions at exhibit of AIDS Memorial Quilt in Santa Rosa

Peter Jordon Smith was an artist, had mastered the art of growing orchids and was a promising chef who had worked at places like Wolfgang Puck’s Postrio in San Francisco when he died of AIDS in 1996. He was 28.

It would take nearly 20 years for his stepmother, Sue Smith, who raised him from the age of 4, to muster the resolve to remember all those tender details of his young life and sew them in perpetuity on a quilt.

On Sunday in Santa Rosa, Peter Smith’s quilt square, full of symbols from his short but full life - yellow orchids, a chef’s uniform with his name, a tiny heart just like the hearts his mother used to sew into the toys she made for him as a child - was publicly displayed for the first time. It will ultimately join more than 48,000 other squares on the AIDS Memorial Quilt. Each is lovingly dedicated to a life lost to the disease.

Several hundred people somberly and tearfully filtered through the sanctuary of Congregation Shomrei Torah on Sunday to view Smith’s new panel. It was part of a moving display that included nine of the 12-by-12-foot quilt blocks, each containing eight hand-made panels. Photos of another ?168 panels were projected on ?the wall throughout the day.

It was the first time in more than 20 years that portions of the AIDS quilt - started by San Francisco AIDS activist Cleve Jones in 1987 at a time when whole communities of people were being wiped out by a mysterious disease with no cure - went on display in Sonoma County.

Smith said the exhibit was a healing experience for many people like herself who were forced by social misunderstanding and condemnation to suffer their grief quietly.

“People are openly comforting each other and given license to talk about this,” she said. “This is one of the first times they’ve been able to openly share their grief.”

After visiting the headquarters of the Names Foundation in Atlanta, where all the squares are archived and stored, a group from Congregation Shomrei Torah’s Social Action Committee resolved to bring a portion of the quilt to Santa Rosa in recognition of LGBT Pride Month.

They invited people from Sonoma County to request squares made for friends or loved ones so each block contained at least one panel with a local connection.

Smith was persuaded to create one for Peter. She stitched the standard 3-by-6-foot panel by hand as she sat near a window in her Sebastopol home that overlooks the meadow where she and her husband, Ed, had planted an oak tree in Peter’s memory years earlier.

Face to Face, the Sonoma County organization formed in the 1980s to help AIDS victims, created a labyrinth of stones, one for each of the 1,180 people who have died of AIDS in the county since 1983. Small bones separated the stones by years, showing the trajectory of the epidemic as it reached its apogee in the 1990s and then leveled off with the discovery of drugs that turned AIDS, for many, into a manageable disease.

Roger McBerty, 77, who was working the table for Face to Face, sat slumped in a chair, his face crumpled in grief as he regarded one of the huge blocks. “Oh God. We lost so many people,” he said, his voice breaking. “But I’m happy this is here. ?This is a sad and joyful thing to see.”

Linda Bornstein was one of the congregation members who went on the trip to the AIDS quilt headquarters and was persuaded by fellow temple member Steve Harper to make a quilt for her only sibling, brother Perry Mark Rubinstein. He died at age 33 in 1994, one year before the FDA approved the first drugs that would prove revolutionary in the treatment of AIDS.

She wound up enlisting another temple member, Marcia Gladstone, to put together a panel that includes poignant reminders of Rubinstein, including a photo of him holding her son; the Tallit, or prayer shawl, he wore at his bar mitzvah; and one of his shirts, a sentimental talisman she had kept in her closet for two decades.

“It’s really comforting,” she said of the panel, which will be sent to Atlanta. There, it will be joined to seven other panels, archived and made available for similar displays all over the country.

“Now,” she said, “it needs to be part of the greater history.”

You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com or 521-5204. On Twitter @megmcconahey.