When Sisters Finally Meet, It’s Sibling Revelry

Let’s face it, you get to be middle-aged and the surprises start running out. At least, the really good ones. Maybe you find out you’re going to be a grandparent. Maybe you get the big promotion at work. Maybe for the first time in your life you see a face across the crowded room. Maybe you hit the lottery.

For the most part, though, the story line has been pretty well laid out by the time you hit 50. From there to the finish line, it’s a matter of staying healthy and enjoying the ride.

So imagine for a moment that you’re Betty O’Keefe. You live in a nice house in Villa Park, you’re happily married and you have two grown sons. You have a twin brother back East and a satisfying career behind you. Life has been good and you’re not complaining.

Then, it changes. You get a surprise that knocks your socks off, and a life that was already rich and rewarding becomes exhilarating and brand new.

For O’Keefe, she can put a time and date on it. “Aug. 2, 1995, about 8:15 in the morning,” she says. “I’m coming down the hall, and my answering machine clicks in: ‘Betty, Betty, this is Bob! Answer the phone! I have our long-lost sister standing next to me!’ ”

Her twin brother was on the line from Elmira, N.Y., saying the words that Betty had hoped for years to hear but never expected to. As he spoke, Betty felt the goose bumps and the tears and knew the search was over.

It was a search that had begun so oddly 35 years earlier that O’Keefe has a hard time believing today how she reacted. Her mother had died of multiple sclerosis when she was 13, and her father remarried. When Betty was 18, she left home and was living with her grandmother when one of her aunts told her, almost casually, “You have a sister.”

Crazy as it sounds to her now, Betty says, she let the matter drop, not even telling her brother until years later.

Over time, though, the words lingered in Betty’s mind, as if stored in the corner of an attic she never got around to cleaning out. Then, one day several years ago, with the rest of her life squared away, only one loose thread was left dangling. Betty called another aunt--one to whom she hadn’t spoken in 25 years.

“Aunt Jean, do I have a sister?” Betty asked.

“You do,” her aunt said.

The aunt didn’t know many details, other than “the sister” was born between 1945 and 1948, making her a few years younger than Betty. The baby had been put up for adoption, probably because of her mother’s deteriorating health, Betty came to learn--even before her mother returned home from the hospital.

Betty racked her brain for childhood memories. Could she remember her mother pregnant? She could not. She phoned cousins and other aunts and uncles. None knew of the existence of a sister to Betty and Bob. Now on a mission, Betty hired a private investigator, contacted a national organization that tracks down relatives and enlisted her brother and old friends in Elmira to check records. She came up empty.

“It was like a mystery,” she says. “No one knew anything.”

Until 1995, that is. Then, in a twist too eerie to be real, brother Bob was a bit late one day for a landscaping job at an Elmira home when a neighbor across the street yelled, “Bob Howland is late today.”

A strange choice of words, and a woman named Janice Bushart happened to hear the name yelled out. She froze. From her birth certificate, she knew her natural parents’ name was Howland before her adoption as an infant. She asked the neighbor to discreetly ask the man what his father’s name was. When the man said, “Bernard,” 49-year-old Janice Bushart knew the landscaper was a brother she never knew.

Fearing rejection, she waited three months before introducing herself. She handed him her birth certificate and adoption papers. “Here, read this,” she said. “I don’t want to cause any problems.” Bob read the papers and, before saying a word, hugged her on the spot.

Betty and Janice first met in September of 1995, a month after their initial phone conversation. Since then, the sisters have visited each other. Next month, Janice will make her second trip to California.

Still effusive in her joy of discovery, Betty O’Keefe says finding out she has a sister--and a full sister, at that--has transformed her life. She shows off her “New Sister Box” stuffed with cards and photographs of her new best friend and one and only sister.

“All the way in the plane to New York [for the first meeting], I’m thinking, ‘This is just like out of the movies,’ ” Betty recalls. “This is so wonderful. I can’t believe this is happening to me. I was overcome with joy, meeting this person I had wanted to see, had felt was out there. . . . As I was coming out the walkway from the plane, I’m thinking, ‘My life will never be the same.’ ”

She talks now of their immutable bond and how they have shared the most intimate secrets, the what-ifs and might-have-beens and the joys of their lives. They wonder how life would be different had they grown up together; Betty is nearly certain hers would be, if only because she might never have left Elmira and met her husband.

No one knows for sure, so they focus on a future they can chart together. “She is my best friend ever,” Betty says of her baby sister, three years younger. “I can’t express how much I love her. It’s family. It’s bonding. It’s love. To think we’ll be there for each other in our old age. That’s the thing that means the most to me. I can’t imagine my life without her now.”

From their first meeting 2 1/2 years ago, the sisters knew they shared something special, something beyond their speech patterns, personal habits and general resemblance. With that in mind, they had a stop to make.

On a beautiful autumn day in Elmira, they first visited the graves of Janice’s adoptive parents. Then, they stepped across the road and stood at the grave of the woman who had given birth to the both of them. “She put her arm around me,” Betty says, “and she looks at my mom’s grave and she says, ‘Thank you for giving me this wonderful sister.’ We stood there and we both just cried. We said, ‘Thank you, God.’ ”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com