It’s no secret; her long life has been a gift

“Don’t you want to ask me what they always ask people who are turning 100?” Jackie Bylsma of Sweet Valley said, smiling expectantly as she prompted a reporter toward the end of an interview.

“You know. What’s my secret?”

The reporter dutifully asked the question, and Bylsma, who will celebrate a century of living on Sept. 18, unfolded a piece of paper and read the answer she had prepared.

“I don’t have a secret,” she said. “I believe our age is predestined by God. The Lord has just given me a long life.”

Her parents, who emigrated to the United States from Holland, lived to be 97 and 99, Bylsma added. “I have good genes.”

She also has a mischievous sense of humor, telling a story about how she recently enlisted the help of two men from her neighborhood to escort her, one walking on either side, to the nearby home of her friend Darlene Cragle.

“Just don’t let her see you,” Bylsma told the men, asking them to duck out of sight while she called to Cragle, who came out and was astonished, maybe even a little frightened, to think that Bylsma apparently had walked over by herself, aided only by her walker.

“You were so surprised,” Bylsma said to her friend, reliving the triumph of her little joke.

On a recent evening Cragle and Bylsma’s daughter Brenda Edwards both spent time with Bylsma, who lives independently, with a little help from aides who perform household chores.

Her neighbor and daughter helped the soon-to-be-centenarian remember other interesting aspects of her life.

“She drove until she was 98,” Cragle said. “And she hated to give up her license.”

“I used to pump my own gas, too,” Bylsma said. “My husband showed me how.”

“She always liked to read,” Edwards said.

Admitting to a fondness for romances about Amish people, Bylsma also opened a word puzzle book and proudly said she had uncovered the “secret word” in one puzzle.

“You’ll know this,” she said. “It’s someone who leads an orchestra — the conductor.”

Bylsma was born in New Jersey, and her parents named her Jacoba, which she said is more common in Holland than in the United States.

“I’m going to be 100,” she said, “and I’ve never met another person yet who has that name.”

She was the third of three daughters, and an aunt and uncle who had no children asked if they could adopt her.

“Of course, my mother said no,” Bylsma said, explaining she’s doubly glad the adoption did not take place — because her aunt and uncle would have taken her to Holland, and she likely would have been there through World War II.

Growing up in the United States, she graduated from high school and worked in a sewing factory that produced Barbizon slips, later switching to a job in an aeronautics factory.

In her late teens she dedicated her life to God and prayed “that someday I would meet a Christian man.”

Her prayers were answered when Jacoba Keyser met David John Bylsma at “a rally for young people.” She was about 19 or 20, and they got engaged at Christmas time, 1942.

In October 1943 they exchanged vows in front of their pastor in the living room of the groom’s parents’ home, and after a brief honeymoon trip to New York City, the groom was sent to England with the U.S. Army Air Forces.

Eventually the couple had three children — Kenneth, Shirley and Brenda — and the family lived in several different states before moving to Sweet Valley. For years Bylsma and her husband served as leaders in the non-profit Child Evangelism Fellowship, which Bylsma explained was “like a Bible club.”

Her husband passed away 21 years ago, at age 77.

“Death parted us for awhile,” is how Bylsma puts it. “Now I am a widow with happy memories.”