On her fifth day of crying over the death of her friend to COVID-19 this year, Cheryl Edwards realized she was dealing with too much grief and sought counseling.

She expected to talk about death. Instead, the therapist asked Edwards about the beginning of her own life.

“I didn’t realize how damaged and hurt I was until I started talking about it,” Edwards said. “She forced me to dig deep within myself and I hated what I saw because I never dealt with it.”

The immense loss Edwards, 53, went through over the last year — three of her friends died from the pandemic — led her to confront the first loss in life she ever suffered, that of her parents who abandoned her at birth.

Edwards isn’t sure how she came into this world, or when or where, but on Aug. 14, 1967, she was discovered inside a pillowcase hidden under a dresser in a vacant apartment of an otherwise occupied West Philadelphia rowhouse. She was naked, weighed 5 pounds, 7 ounces, and the umbilical cord that once tied her to her mother was cut but still attached.

The residents of the building who found Edwards mistook her for a chicken and threw her away in a trash bin behind the house that night. Her story might have ended there, if not for the actions of one observant neighborhood resident whose curiosity saved Edwards’ life.

Until two years ago, when Edwards contacted The Inquirer to see if the paper had written an article about the day she was found, the details of her first hours on this earth were a mystery to her.

Many still are.

“There’s no worse feeling in the world than not knowing who your biological parents are. It’s such an empty, empty feeling,” Edwards said. “Some people don’t know one parent, but to not to know who both of them are, it’s like I was dropped out of the sky. Nobody knows anything.

“But somebody knows something,” she said.

Edwards’ earliest memories begin around the age of 5, when she was a little girl growing up in Overbrook as the seventh child of the late Ernest Lee Sr. and Susan Edwards.

“I had the best childhood,” she said. “We always went on summer vacations and Christmases were phenomenal.”

On Christmas mornings, the Edwardses would assign each of their children a chair or a portion of the sofa where they would leave all of their gifts covered up with a sheet, to be unveiled in a glorious fury of holiday elation.

Longtime foster parents, Susan Edwards was a homemaker who loved children and Ernest Lee Edwards Sr. was a landlord who also worked at a dry cleaners and delivered blood.

The Edwardses had six biological children of their own before taking in Cheryl when she was 3 months old. She was the first of five nonbiological children the couple raised.

Edwards’ sister Laurette McNear, 65, of West Philadelphia, the eldest of the Edwardses’ biological children, was 12 when her parents took Cheryl into their family. She recalls Cheryl being a very little but very happy baby.

“She was just a joy,” McNear said. “As she grew up she was just a fun person. She could laugh, oh my gosh could she giggle. We used to call her Shaky Shoulders because she would laugh and her shoulders would just be going up and down.”

Edwards didn’t discover her mom and dad weren’t her biological parents until she was 9, when they told her she was abandoned as a baby and they wanted to officially adopt her.

“I thought, ‘OK, sure, as long as I don’t have to go anywhere,’ ” Edwards said. “I didn’t want to leave them.”

The day her parents took her to a lawyer’s office to finalize the adoption paperwork was a school day and when Edwards returned to her fourth-grade class at Overbrook Elementary School that afternoon, her teacher — who was aware of why she had been absent — asked her to stand in front of her class and tell everyone what happened.

“I said, ‘I was legally adopted today,’ and the whole class clapped,” she recalled. “Back then I felt special because it was different. Nobody else in my class had that experience, and I got to dress up that day and my mom did my hair.”

But two years later, someone turned Edwards’ own story against her, making her question, for the first time, what being adopted meant.

“In sixth grade one girl got mad at me for something and said, ‘You old adopted thing,’ ” Edwards said. “I’m 53 years old and that’s still with me.”

That one cruel comment hit Edwards like a stone thrown at a pane of glass, leaving behind fractures and questions that only grew over time.

And last year, the glass finally shattered.

A person close to Cheryl with intimate knowledge of her story used it against her in an argument by asking “Do you even know who your parents are?”

“That crushed my soul. I couldn’t say a word. I couldn’t speak,” she said. “It took me a long time to even tell him my story and I had no idea he would use it against me like that.”

Edwards decided at that moment she wanted to reclaim her story so it could never be weaponized against her again.

“I said this is the second person who destroyed me with this information, so I’m going to spin and make it positive,” she said. “But I don’t think I would have ever done it if I didn’t go to counseling.”

Angelle Richardson, a family therapist and assistant professor of community and trauma counseling at Thomas Jefferson University who specializes in adoption and was adopted herself, said the ability to tell one’s own story is so important and when that’s taken away, it can be traumatizing. And trauma can affect someone throughout their life in ways they may not realize until they enter therapy, she said.

“To be able to sit with someone who is trained to walk beside you, to help you process, to be a mirror, and to be someone who’s not going to judge you can be so empowering,” Richardson said. “It can be such a place of relief.”

For decades, the only documentation Edwards had about her early life and adoption were letters from the lawyer her parents hired to help them through the process and a one-page document her mother gave her when she was 18 from a caseworker at Philadelphia’s Department of Public Welfare, the predecessor to the Department of Human Services.

The three-paragraph memo that Ernest Lee Sr. and Susan Edwards received when they took Cheryl into their care states she was found by neighbors in a vacant second-floor room of a rowhouse, but it offers few details about her discovery beyond that. When she was brought to the hospital by police, doctors estimated she was between 12 and 24 hours old. She had an abrasion and bruises on her left arm and inflammation of her left eye.

“The nurse at the hospital took very good care of Cheryl,” the unsigned document reads. “It was one of the nurses who named her.”

Cheryl, which derives from French, means darling or beloved.

“Not having a name or any kind of connection to my birth parents still bothers me to this day. I don’t even know my real birth date,” Edwards said, quietly crying, when asked what it was like to learn a nurse named her. “Who doesn’t know when their real birthday is? It’s just this big question mark. Still, to this day, it’s like ‘Who am I?’ ”

According to the memo, efforts made by police to locate Edwards’ birth parents were unsuccessful and there “were no leads to their identity.”

Edwards’ parents never discouraged her from trying to find her birth parents, and at various points in her life, she’s undertaken the task, only to reach one roadblock after another.

“I didn’t have a name or anything to go on, so it was like going down a rabbit hole,” she said.

But she never let the unanswered questions from her past stop her from doing “anything other than moving forward,” she said.

After graduating from Overbrook High School in 1985, Edwards received a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Gwynedd Mercy University and pursued a career as a secretary, working locally for companies like Dow Chemical and CompuCon.

She married her now ex-husband in 1992 and two years later, she became a mother herself, giving birth to her only child, a son, who is now 26.

“I always wanted him to feel loved and wanted,” said Edwards, who is close with her son. “I think, subconsciously, I didn’t want him to feel the hurt I felt.”

In 2017, Edwards relocated to College Park, Md., where she now works for a water-quality company arranging interviews and travel accommodations for prospective hires. It was through her job’s employee-assistance program that Edwards sought counseling this year and told her story to a stranger for the first time.

Before that, Edwards often confided in her sister McNear, a social worker who counsels foster parents, about how difficult it was to walk down the street in Philadelphia and not know if the person she was passing by was her mother.

“I know how painful it is to carry that weight,” McNear said. “It was everyday knowledge that there was that part of her story missing.”

Over the years, Edwards has often thought about doing an ancestry kit, like 23andMe or AncestryDNA, to learn about her heritage and see if she could be genetically linked with any living relatives. But she always gets nervous and backs off because she’s not sure what the response will be if she discovers she has blood relatives.

“I’m afraid of their reaction, not mine,” she said. “Will they be receptive? I don’t want to be rejected again. That’s the underlying issue.”

Richardson, the therapist, said it’s a valid fear.

“If you think about it, she was, for lack of a better word, rejected from birth, and so her worldview is a worldview that encompasses rejection and abandonment,” Richardson said. “So why would I set myself up to be rejected again?”

Efforts to uncover information about Edwards’ birth parents and the first three months of her life — either through the hospital in which she was taken, the Philadelphia City Archives, or any social service or foster care records — proved futile.

Edwards can’t recall now what made her reach out to The Inquirer in 2019 to see if the paper had written an article about the day she was found.

“Every once in a while I get this overwhelming feeling where I have to find something and then I drop it,” she said.

According to the article, which appeared in the Aug. 15, 1967, Inquirer — an edition that included stories about the ongoing Vietnam War and mayoral debates between incumbent James H.J. Tate and District Attorney Arlen Specter — Edwards was discovered in a house in the Mantua section of West Philly.

News reports from the time describe Mantua as a community of more than 20,000 people besieged by poverty, rats, and violence (a 1969 article in the Philadelphia Tribune said Mantua had “the highest crime rate of any section of the city”). But it was also during the ’60s that Mantua became home to “The Young Great Society,” a grassroots nonprofit founded by Herman Wrice and Andrew Jenkins that created more than 60 occupational, educational, cultural, health, and other programs for youth and adults throughout the neighborhood, including a thrift shop, day care, and an orphanage.

It was around 8 p.m. on Aug. 14, 1967, that a 15-year-old boy named James Drain who lived at 3616 Haverford Ave. went in to get his bicycle from a vacant second-floor room where he stored it in the building where he lived. When he opened the door, he heard a noise coming from inside.

“I heard something that sounded like a chicken,” he told The Inquirer. “I got scared and ran downstairs and called my mother.”

Identified in the article only as Mrs. Drain, 56, James Drain’s mother accompanied him to the room and discovered the pillowcase under the dresser. She too believed the noise coming from it sounded like the clucking of a chicken. Frightened, she called another resident of the building, George Ikard, 61.

Ikard had heard noises coming from the room three days prior.

“But I never pay any attention,” he said. “I just want to listen to my ballgame.”

Once he finally did enter the room, at Mrs. Drain’s request, Ikard pulled the pillowcase and its kicking contents out from beneath the dresser and put it in the trash behind the building.

He never looked inside. He was too afraid, he told a reporter.

But one person was not. And that person saved Edwards’ life.

Margaret Rogers, 50, another resident of the building, saw Ikard place the writhing pillowcase in the trash. Curious, Rogers went to the trash, pulled the pillowcase out, and discovered Edwards inside.

“Oh my God. It’s a baby!” she said.

Rogers took Edwards into her home and heated up milk for her as Mrs. Drain called the police. Edwards was taken to Philadelphia General Hospital, while authorities searched for her birth parents.

“If you see the doctors at the hospital, tell them I want it,” Rogers told The Inquirer reporter.

To the best of Edwards’ knowledge, she never saw Rogers again.

As Edwards read the details of her own story for the first time, she was gutted.

“The thing that bothered me most was that I was thrown in the trash,” she said.

But Edwards also found people to admire in the story, like James Drain, the teen who went to get help instead of “going about his business,” and, of course, Margaret Rogers, who was the first person on this earth to care for her.

“I know she’s probably long gone by now, but I owe her my life,” Edwards said.

When her thoughts turn to her birth parents, several scenarios come to Edwards’ mind. She wonders if her mother was young and terrified. She wonders if she was pregnant by a married man. She wonders if she was raped.

She wonders about all of the possibilities, all of the time.

“As hurtful as this has been for me, over time I’ve tried to put myself in her shoes. It’s a woman’s choice to have a child. I wonder what her choices were,” Edwards said. “Did she just see no other way out, that this is all she could do? There had to be a reason, and it’s a reason I’ll never know.”

An article from the Aug. 19, 1967, edition of the Philadelphia Tribune offered additional details about Edwards’ discovery.

In that piece, Rogers’ name is listed as Margaret Rogers Booker and she’s identified as a nurse who lived nearby on the 3600 block of Brandywine Street.

“O my God I just love the baby; she had an urge to live,” she told a Tribune reporter.

The quote hit hard for Edwards, who sees herself “as a survivor and a fighter,” but what hit her even harder was the last, unattributed line of the Tribune story.

“Doctors at PGH said the girl weighed 5½ pounds. It is being detained there while police attempt to locate the child’s mother, who is believed to be only 15 years old.”

When Edwards heard that detail for the first time recently, she openly wept for minutes on end.

“She was young,” Edwards said, through her tears.

Lori Bruce, a policy analyst and ethicist who serves as associate director of Yale University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, has studied infant abandonment and said that in all likelihood, Edwards’ birth mother felt as if she had no option.

“Many of these women feel that they do not have any sort of choice,” she said. “We see it happening across socioeconomic classes and across cultures, women can face intolerable social or economic consequences from being pregnant. Traditionally, there’s this great stigma — mothers are supposed to give everything to their children, but sometimes they don’t have any more to give.”

From 2016 to 2020, 18 infants under 28 days old were abandoned in Philadelphia, according to the Philadelphia Department of Human Services.

It’s unclear if any of those cases involved a child being turned over through the state’s Safe Haven Law, a DHS spokesperson said, because the department does not have a separate data code for Safe Haven cases.

Safe Haven Laws — which, by 2008, had been passed in every state — allow someone to relinquish an infant at a designated place like a hospital or police station without facing prosecution. But the laws vary widely from state to state when it comes to how old the infant can be, who can drop the baby off, and where the drop-offs may occur.

In Pennsylvania, parents can relinquish infants up to 28 days old at hospitals, police stations, and EMS stations without facing prosecution, so long as the infant is not injured. While the city does not track Safe Haven cases, the state Department of Human Services’ 2019 Child Abuse Report said that between 2002, when the law was enacted, and 2019, 46 infants were relinquished statewide. Only five of those cases occurred in Southeast Pennsylvania.

Bruce said the issue with Safe Haven Laws is they protect the infant, but not the mother. As legislatures created these laws, they often sought insight from existing power structures, like law enforcement and hospital administration officials, but rarely from the people who may be most affected by the laws — at-risk women.

“As opposed to thinking about how can we help these women find a way to be stable enough that they wouldn’t ever have to consider this horrific position, instead it was ‘Let’s fix this by helping those babies get into safe homes of people who have demonstrated economic and social security,’ ” Bruce said. “The problem is that if women don’t follow the letter of the law perfectly, they can be prosecuted, and sometimes they are.”

The Mantua house where Edwards was discovered in 1967 was demolished sometime between the fall of 2018 and the summer of 2019. The now-vacant lot is across the street from artist James Dupree’s vibrantly painted Dupree Studios.

Today, many of the residents of this changing neighborhood, including students from nearby universities, weren’t even born in 1967.

But every Philly neighborhood has at least one local armchair historian, someone who’s stayed on the block, even as the neighborhood around them changed.

A man in his 60s out walking his Yorkie recently knew just such a resident, who lives around the corner and a block from where Edwards was found.

“This is the guy,” he said. “If anybody knows anything, it’ll be him.”

From the start, Edwards knew it was unlikely any of the adults mentioned in news reports about her discovery would be alive today. The man who placed her in the trash, George Ikard, would be 115; the woman who pulled her from it, Margaret Rogers Booker, would be 104, and Mrs. Drain, who called the police, would be 110.

But Edwards hoped James Drain, the boy who first heard her cry, might still be around. He’d be 69 today.

The longtime resident came to the door and listened to a reporter share Edwards’ story. When he heard James Drain’s name he stopped cold.

“My name is Drain,” he said. “Lionel Drain.”

James, he said, was his cousin, and he died more than a decade ago. But up until his death, James Drain lived in that house on Haverford Avenue where he found Edwards all those years ago, Lionel Drain said.

He vaguely remembered his cousin finding a newborn baby, and thinks he may have even received some kind of award for it. He said James Drain went on to have a daughter of his own, but he couldn’t recall her name.

“Oh, there’s one more thing,” he said. “James was adopted.”

Efforts to locate other relatives of Drain, or any relatives for George Ikard and Margaret Rogers Booker were unsuccessful.

While Edwards was disheartened to learn she’d never have a chance to meet the first person who found her, she was struck that she shared something so personal in common with him.

“Wow, that’s really something,” she said. “James was adopted, too.”

Until today, Edwards has shared her story with only a handful of people.

She reached back out to The Inquirer this year to reclaim her story, to seek closure, and to tell others who have been abandoned at birth that they are not alone.

“I am a firm believer you go through things in your life for a reason, and you might go through things to help somebody else get through it,” she said. “I want people to know that even if you had a messed-up start, you don’t have to end up that way.”

Edwards said she hopes her story reaches a young woman who may be pregnant and scared and not know what to do.

“This story is not just about me, it’s also about a mother who made a decision, and there are plenty of mothers who are in that same boat who don’t really know what to do,” she said. “If you do find yourself pregnant, it’s not the child’s fault. Give them a fair chance. I can honestly say I’m glad whoever my biological mother was, she gave me a chance, the chance to let somebody find me.”

If her biological mother is alive today and reads her story, Edwards wants her to know she doesn’t hate her. She would like to meet her, and hear her story, too.

“There’s a part of me, as hurt as I am, that still has a feeling for her,” she said, “because I am a part of her.”

If you have information on Cheryl’s story, we’d love to hear from you. Please contact Inquirer reporter Stephanie Farr at sfarr@inquirer.com.