Afterword

WHEN GRANDMA PRAYED her birthday prayer for Betty Jane in May 2006, my first son was only five weeks old. I was shocked a couple of months later when my brother Grant called to tell me that Grandma had found her long-lost daughter —someone we hadn’t even known existed. He and my mother, Dianna, were preparing to fly to California for the reunion.

Often, while nursing my son, I’d try to imagine having to give him up, an agony I now knew Grandma had endured. The idea was so unbearable, so inconceivable, that it caused me to weep every time I thought about it.

As thrilled as I was that Grandma had finally gotten her daughter back, I was living in the sleep-deprived fog that accompanies the first months of motherhood. During the next few years, I enjoyed getting occasional updates about their relationship, but my life was too consumed by babies and toddlers for me to pay attention to much outside my own home in Oregon.

But Brian Lee and I started exchanging regular e-mails, and he and Teresa —the brand-new cousins we’d never met —began sending yearly Christmas presents to my boys and to Grant’s twin girls.

As Grandma was celebrating her one hundredth birthday in 2011, an Associated Press article about her reunion story went viral. Brian and I wrote to each other, discussing how crazy all the attention was. He mentioned that this story would make a great book.

Early in 2012, with the blessing of Brian, Grandma, and Ruth, I began researching and writing The Waiting.

As the months rolled by, Brian and I began talking regularly by phone and video chat. We texted constantly. Although we’d never met in person, in time he became like my third brother. He gave me a hard time. I called him a variety of pet names. Typical family stuff.

This past November, we finally met. Brian, Teresa, Ruth, and I flew to Southern California to meet with Grandma and a crew from Tyndale, our publisher, to sit for interviews and photographs. On that day, Stephen Vosloo took the book’s exquisite cover portrait of Grandma holding the picture of Betty Jane that she’d carried so long.

By this point, I’d been writing about Betty Jane for nearly two years. I’d read hundreds of pages of letters Grandma had written about her baby. I’d worked on scenes depicting those agonizing moments when she gave up Betty Jane, as well as stories about Grandma crying into her pillow during all the years that she kept her memories locked deep in her heart. Every day as I wrote, I looked at a copy of the photo of Grandma and her baby, which I’d pinned above my computer.

And now I was going to meet Betty Jane, at last.

Walking around the corner into the lobby of Grandma’s church, where Ruth and Brian waited, was a surreal experience. There stood “Betty Jane,” white-haired and smiling and little! (Evidently only some of us got those oversized DeYoung genes.)

I’m fairly stoic, and it was a bit awkward to have cameras there, but tears filled my eyes as I hugged Ruth tightly. Hugging Brian was like greeting one of my closest friends whom I hadn’t seen in a while.

Over the next few days I got to watch Grandma and Ruth and Brian together, and it was one of the biggest treats of my life. You would have thought Grandma and Brian had known each other forever —their nonstop clever banter delighted Grandma to no end.

And I’d never seen two people interact the way Grandma and Ruth did —like the closest of sisters but with zero friction. Almost every time we got together, without planning to, they dressed alike, right down to their beloved “bling.” They patted each other and took care of each other and kept track of each other’s handbags and fussed over each other in exactly the right measure.

My mother says that there was always a bit of sadness around Grandma, which is gone now. We agree that we’ve never seen her happier.

Since that visit I’ve communicated with all of Ruth’s children by e-mail and have spoken to Mark and Jay on the phone. Brian and I continue to antagonize each other nearly daily. And Ruth and I stay in contact. She prays for me when I’m sick. When the temperatures in Wisconsin get too bitterly cold, I text to make sure she’s staying warm.

Long before we knew anything about “Betty Jane” or my grandma’s painful past, my brothers and I agreed that our strong, tireless, selfless grandmother was the most extraordinary person we’d ever known. It is no surprise to us that her first daughter, and that daughter’s children, are extraordinary as well.

* * *

In the years since their first reunion, my grandma and the Lees have slipped seamlessly into the close relationships typical of any loving family whose members live far apart. Brian calls Grandma every Wednesday to chat.

“This is Lieutenant Colonel Lee,” he’ll say, “reporting in to higher headquarters.”

“It’s about time!” Grandma says triumphantly.

He has also become a sort of extra caretaker for her. During one of her visits to his home in Huntsville, Alabama, Brian noticed that Grandma’s military dependent ID card carried an expiration date. He took her to his local garrison and had her card updated to an “indefinite renewal” status.

Grandma visits her family all around the country —she flies to Portland to see us, to Huntsville to visit Brian. Though she can’t make up for all the years she didn’t know six of her grandchildren and their families, she’s made it a point to be at some of the key events in their lives. She flew to Houston when Jay had a baby baptized at his Lutheran church, and to Georgia when Brian’s son graduated from college and was commissioned into the army.

In the years following the reunion, my family noticed an intriguing phenomenon. As Grandma approached her hundredth birthday, she seemed to be aging backward. Her volunteer activities continued apace. She traveled to Nashville to attend church conferences.

For her centennial birthday celebration, Jay and Brian flew to California to surprise her. The Piedmont School District in Oakland, which is still paying for all her health care, sent a representative more than four hundred miles south to congratulate her. (I couldn’t help but wonder if they wanted to make sure she was still really here!) The following spring, Ruth and Grandma flew to Brian’s house to celebrate their birthdays together —Grandma’s recent one hundredth, and Ruth’s upcoming eighty-third.

In fall 2013, just before Grandma turned 102, she and my cousin Dawn flew to Georgia to celebrate Brian’s son’s wedding with the extended Lee family. Shortly before taking that trip, Grandma had joined a local gym with plans to work out several times a week. She told me, “I want to keep up my strength.” During her first visit, she rode the exercise bike for fifteen minutes. “It was hard,” she said, “but I just kept my mind on something else.” She continues to manage her little apartment complex too.

Last year when Grandma was here in Oregon for a visit, I went by my mom’s apartment to pick her up. I noticed Grandma wasn’t wearing her eyeglasses, and I asked her where they were.

“Oh, I don’t need those anymore,” she said. “My vision has gotten better —I can see fine now. When I wear the glasses, it’s just to cover the bags under my eyes.”

It seems fitting that Grandma’s sight is better today than it’s been in years. After seeing so much of the hardness of life, she now savors each glimpse of its beauty.