Archdeacon: An unexpected gift becomes a 'miracle' for Dayton … – Dayton Daily News

FAIRBORN — She woke up on July 20 with a message on her phone.
It said Tamra Pitzen wanted to connect through the genetic testing service 23andMe.
“I thought, ‘I don’t know who this person is,’ but I opened the message,” said Jane Koester, a senior administrative assistant in the provost’s office at University of Dayton.
Pitzen, who lives in the Toledo suburb of Oregon and goes by Tammy, remembers what she wrote:
“I told her, ‘So … it looks like we’re sisters.’”

As Koester recalled that moment while sitting at the dining room table of her Fairborn home the other day, her eyes began to glisten and her voice filled with emotion.
“I’m going to cry,” she whispered.
“I remember I sat there thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, this could really be happening.’ It was a surreal feeling.”
Since she was a little girl growing up in Delphos in the 1960s, Koester knew she’d been adopted. She said she’d never thought about trying to find her birth parents until she developed some health issues after having her own three children. Wanting to know her medical history, she contacted Toledo Catholic Charities, which had facilitated her adoption in 1961.
She was given no names and told only that both of her parents had been healthy. But she never pursued the issue further while her adoptive parents, Bob and Rita Koester, were alive.
“I didn’t want to hurt their feelings, by them thinking I was looking elsewhere,” she said. “I loved them. With them, I had — I still have — that deep-rooted feeling you have for your mom and dad.”
Several years after the Koesters passed away — Rita died in 2003, and Bob died in 1997 — Jane got a copy of her original birth certificate from the State of Ohio, and it contained her birth mother’s name.
“That made her a real person to me, but there was no mention of my father,” she said. “I was like: ‘Dang, how am I ever going to know who that person is?’”
There was no town listed for her mother, but she figured it was Toledo since she was born there at St. Francis Hospital. She did some online searches and found an obituary for her grandfather and, in it, her mother’s married name.
She waited another year, and finally — in the spring of 2015 — she wrote her birth mother a letter that was forwarded by an Akron adoption network that helps with such reunions.
“I just thanked her for giving me a life,” Jane said. “I wanted her to know that I was OK. That I’d had a wonderful mom and dad and a great family. And I wanted to open the door if she wanted to connect.”
She never got a response.
A couple of years later, she tried again with another letter and a card. She added her children’s first names and wanted to relay that her birth mother had “some wonderful grandchildren.”
Both times she heard nothing.
“Finally, I kind of let it go,” she said. “I didn’t want to keep getting my feelings hurt, and I also wanted to respect her and not stir up any bad memories. I’d never mentioned my birth dad to her. I didn’t know the circumstances of all that.”
Last summer she did a DNA search through 23andMe, but she said she only learned about a few cousins.
Then came that out-of-the-blue message from Tammy, who now admits she was just as nervous on her end when Jane had responded with her phone number and a suggestion they talk.
“It took me about an hour to get the courage,” Tammy said. “I didn’t know what to expect. But then I got her on the phone and we started talking. We were two sisters and pretty soon we both were both crying.”
As Jane remembers: “I told her, ‘This is incredible!’
“And she told me: ‘I had no idea.’”
But then, no one in Tammy’ family did, not even her dad — 79-year-old Dan Tucker — who, it turned out, was Jane’s dad, as well.

‘What the (expletive)?’
Dan grew up in Toledo and, as he was going to Scott High School, got a job washing dishes at Mercy Hospital. A co-worker went to an all girl’s Catholic school in town, and they became friends and then dated for a few months, he said
They went to the prom together, but when his uncle gave him a job at an auto shop, he left the hospital and they “drifted apart,” he said.
He said she eventually began to date another guy they worked with, and they married and had two children.
Dan married, too, and he and his late wife had two daughters: Jennifer, who was born in 1965, and Tammy, who came five years later.
On occasion Dan said he’d see his old girlfriend and her husband around town, but each was immersed in their own lives and he had no idea she’d been pregnant when they’d separated.

“If dad had known he had a baby girl out there, she never would have been put up for adoption,” Tammy said. “He’d have fought to keep her. That’s the kind of man he is.
“He’s been my rock through a lot. I lost my 14-month-old grandson — my beautiful, blue-eyed Cody — in 2010. He drowned, and it was terrible. Dad got me through that and he still does.”
She told about going to visit the little boy’s grave recently, and as she was leaving the cemetery, she saw her dad parked in the distance. He had come just to keep an eye on her and make sure she was OK.
“When I went through a (tough) divorce, he was there again,” she said. “He would have been there for Jane, too, but he didn’t have a clue.”
And that’s why he hadn’t hesitated when she asked him this summer if he cared if she did an ancestry search.
“The day I got my results, I opened them about 11:30 at night,” she said. “I started reading, and it said ‘half-sister,’ and I was like, ‘What the (expletive)?’”
Her boyfriend, Randy, was there and pretty much summed it up:
“Uh-oh!”
Building a family
Bob Koester and his brother, Maynard, ran a jewelry store in Delphos.
He and Rita adopted their son, Patrick, in 1957, and four years later Toledo Catholic Charities informed them of a little girl born on Oct. 23, 1961.
“I think they got me when I was about six weeks old,” Jane said.
“My mother and most of her family had red hair and I was born with red hair,” she added with a smile. “Even now, when I go back home to Delphos, people will say, ‘You’re Rita Koester’s daughter. You look just like her.’ What a blessing.”
She said she had “a great life,” though she admitted, “back then, some kids would tease you about being adopted.”
Her parents, she said, defused any such derision with a loving explanation:
“I remember my mom and dad told me: ‘You know other moms and dads have children that they’re sometimes stuck with. We feel very fortunate. We got to pick you out of all the other little babies.’
“I always felt special about that. I felt really blessed growing up.”
She graduated from Delphos St. John’s High School and eventually married a guy from a nearby town, and they had two children: Chad, who now lives in Florida, and Kimberly, who is the mother of two young children, is active duty Army and in February will become a Lieutenant Colonel.
That marriage soon dissolved — “We were just too young,” she said — and she later remarried and had youngest daughter Dana, who’s now 30.
They were a career Air Force family, and 10 years were spent overseas in Germany, Italy and Japan.
They moved back to Ohio from Alaska because of her mother’s failing health and settled in Fairborn, and Rita came to live with them for three years until she died.
Jane worked almost seven years at Wright State University in the school’s Honors Program and in the Office of Organizational Development and Learning and then came to UD in 2017 and worked in the School of Law before joining the Provost’s Office.
Some 5½ years ago, her brother, Patrick, died of a heart attack, and that meant the immediate family of her childhood was now all gone.
That loss helped push her to find a past that might still be there.
The perfect fit
After Tammy’s “uh-oh” realization, she was able to reach her dad the next morning.
“She said, ‘Dad, they say I have a half-sister in Dayton, Ohio,” Dan said.
He said it must be some kind of mix up, but then Tammy’s boyfriend got on the phone, told him the name of the girl they’d gotten from Jane and asked if he’d known her.
“I did,” Dan said. “She was a nice girl and we had dated awhile… And then it hit me. At first I couldn’t believe it, but the timing was right. And suddenly it was like every light in the house came on. Nothing ever felt so right in my life.”
That day, he called Jane, and they spoke for an hour and 45 minutes.
During the conversation, he shared an observation about her birth mother:
“Jane could never make the connection with her mother, and I said, ‘Maybe this isn’t the way you wanted it, but at the time, your mother made the biggest decision she’d ever made and she was just a teenager then.
“‘You’ve got to respect her privacy. She didn’t abort you. She put you up for adoption. She gave you a chance.’”
He and Jane then agreed to meet the next day at Tammy’s home.
When they did, Tammy came out first, her little dog cradled in one arm, and the two sisters, seeing each other for the first time, melted together in an emotional embrace.
“We don’t look alike — she looks like her mother — but we’re alike here,” Jane said tapping her heart.
Her father came out next, and they hugged and cried, and soon Tammy joined them.

“As soon as I saw Jane, I fell in love with her,” Dan said. “Her mother and dad who adopted her had to be super people. It’s clear they did a great job raising her. She’s a super girl.
“If I’d have gone shopping for a daughter, I never could have found anyone better than her. Everyone here loves her.”
Jane has visited her extended family six times since the summer, and they’ve come here.
“I’ve never seen a family just fit together so quickly,” Dan said. “It’s like throwing a puzzle into the air, and when the pieces landed, they all fit together.”
As the months have gone by, Jane and Tammy have discovered numerous similarities from the way they talk and cook and decorate to their affection for their little dogs.
“They both had the same set of matching pajamas with their dogs,” Dan laughed.
“And at Christmas we both got each other a sister’s necklace and a candle,” Tammy said. “It just happened. The same gifts!”
Jane never felt the familial kinship more than a week before Christmas when two of her children — Chad from Orlando and Dana from Columbus — went with her to the home of Tammy’s daughter, Jenna, in Temperance, Michigan.
“She had the Taylor Family Christmas, and the house was full of laughter, and the kids were playing. We had a blast,” Jane said, her voice again breaking.
“On the drive home, Dana said: ‘Mom, this was how I always wanted family to feel.’”

Celebrating the ‘miracle’
Dan, who’ll be 80 in a week and has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, said his brother told him: “This has breathed new life into you.”
“He reminded me how, when we went to visit our sister in the rest home, all I did was talk about which one of us was gonna die first,” Dan said.
“He said, ‘Now you’re looking to the future. You’re back in the game.’”
Awhile back, Dan even made up an “It’s a Girl” baby announcement with a white stork holding a pink bundle from its beak. It read: “Jane Ellen Koester … Born October 23, 1961 … Toledo, Ohio.”
“I tried to recreate some of the things she missed out on,” he said. “She deserves the whole package.”
He drove to Dayton on her birthday, and she took him to Mamma DiSalvo’s.
He visited again Dec. 30, this time with Tammy, and Jane gave them a tour of the University of Dayton.
“I’m telling you, if you wrote a book, you couldn’t make up a story any better,” Dan said.
“There are so many (crappy) stories in the world now, but this one feels so right, so good, and I think people need to hear it. And people need to know if you’re not sure where you came from, it’s worth looking.”
No one knows that more than Jane, who has had a couple of numbing personal losses in recent years that would have left anyone reeling.
“I have a deep-rooted faith, and I know there are other people in the world who are so much more deserving of a miracle,” she said, the tears now spilling over. “But I thought, ‘Boy, if I could get just a little one.’
“Instead, He gave me a big one.
“It’s amazing. It truly is amazing.
“This is a gift, and it just keeps giving and giving and giving.”

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