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closeIt only took 30 years to plan this wedding
Couple reunited after decades apart
Heather Meier
For 30 years there were miles, sometimes as many as 3,000 and at other times as few as 10, separating Donna Buehler and Grady Green but that didn’t matter. Anytime either heard Barry Manilow’s “Can’t smile without you,” they were suddenly together again on the Washington coast in the late 1970s, young and in love.
“It was just a whirlwind,” Buehler said.
During those day dreams of trips to Ocean Shores, Green would recall TV programs where long lost lovers were reunited and wondered if he would ever get to see the love of his life just one more time. He looked for her but doubted he would find her again. Their song served as a reminder of a relationship that slipped through his fingers.
The two met while he was working at a car dealership and she ran an employment agency. She thought he was wasting his talent and set him up with a job interview at a sales company. It was the beginning of a new career and a budding friendship, he said.
She disagrees.
“It was hot from the beginning,” she said.
After a three-year romance, the couple had plans to get married back then. But an old boyfriend reappeared and Buehler and Green never made it down the aisle.
“It was terrible,” Green said. “She broke my heart.”
The two went their separate ways — he eventually moved to Florida where he opened a number of stores and she got married, had a daughter and moved to Edgewood.
“Life went on,” she said and they lost touch with one another.
But they never forgot about each other. Since moving into her Edgewood home 22 years ago, Buehler has kept a photo of Green in an album in a night stand drawer. In Flordia, Green dated many women but none compared to the sweetheart who broke his heart in Washington.
“There just was not anybody out there for me,” he said.
Three years ago, Green’s sons from an earlier marriage convinced him to return to Washington. He brought his aging mother with him and housed her in a nursing home on South Hill, settled in Bonney Lake and opened a store there. It was good to be close to his family but it was lonely. He visited his mother several times a day but she has Alzheimer’s and sometimes couldn’t even remember his name. His sons were busy with their own families and he didn’t want to interfere. In the evenings he would return to an empty house.
He spent those free hours surfing the Internet and thumbing through the phone book, always trying to find Buehler.
“I started from the day I moved back here,” he said.
Then, this past Thanksgiving, Buehler had a strange dream about Green. He was making a movie and told her that her scene was coming up. It was a dream that left her unsettled and she couldn’t stop thinking about it. Late Friday night, she called information and asked for the phone numbers of all the Grady Greens in the area. There were two.
“I don’t know if I have the right number or not,” she said to the Bonney Lake man who answered her first call.
Yes, he told her. “I’ve been looking for you for years.”
Despite 30 years apart, he still knew the sound of her voice. The two talked for more than two hours, trying to catch up on the lost years. Green wanted to visit her right away but she told him he would have to wait until the following evening.
“That phone call changed my whole life,” he said.
The next morning, though, she called him back and said she wasn’t going to meet him. She explained that she had lost the use of her legs during a surgery and gained weight — she didn’t want him to see her like that.
That didn’t deter Green. He wanted to see the woman he had been missing for 30 years. She relented. Her friends came over and helped her get ready for their first date.
And it was back into the whirlwind romance.
“It’s so effortless,” Buehler said. “I’m just so naturally happy with him.”
They were engaged shortly before Christmas, spent the holiday together and Green is already talking about adopting Buehler’s teenage daughter, whose father passed away when she was young.
A friend “spiritually” married the couple and Green was quick to begin wearing a wedding band even though they weren’t yet legally wed.
“In my heart I have been married to her,” he said. “I look forward to coming home.”
They should have been married 30 years ago, she said. It took a little longer than most weddings, but they were finally married this past Saturday. She took his last name, making it difficult for him to ever lose her again.
“It’s not surface love. It’s true all the way down to your toes love,” Green said.