Janet Miller Keim

Janet Keim, who spent more than fifty years working to persuade frightened young women in crisis that their lives were not over, departed this life on Sunday evening, August 30, 2026, at WakeMed Cary Hospital in Cary, North Carolina. She was 83. An unexpected illness progressed with extraordinary speed; her two sons were with her when she died.

This was, perhaps, the only way death was ever going to catch her. Given sufficient notice, Janet would almost certainly have organized a committee to “deal with the problem” or simply willed it away.

She was born August 24, 1943, in Norfolk, Virginia, to John Henry Miller and Ida Schmucker. She grew up among the Amish-Mennonite community in rural Princess Anne County, Virginia (now the City of Virginia Beach), attending Kempsville Mennonite Church and School. She spent warm summer evenings on the Intracoastal Waterway with her parents and five siblings, and cool spring days helping her father tend the large garden that was his pride and joy. Her life revolved around the twin poles of family and church, a habit she never grew out of.

In 1985, Janet helped found the Crisis Pregnancy Center of Tidewater. She then spent more than four decades building, guiding, cajoling, defending, enlarging, and praying over this ministry. The CPC grew and eventually adopted her name, operating as The Keim Centers. Her life’s work was to meet women in crisis with practical help, fierce hope, and the conviction that neither they nor their children were disposable.

“Crisis,” in retrospect, was never quite Janet’s word. She saw the world mostly as problems requiring attention and tasks requiring someone to do them. If no one had yet been assigned to a task, she was usually prepared to remedy the oversight.

Over the years, thousands of women came through CPC’s doors, and through the doors of Janet’s home: women who were pregnant and frightened, women caught in addiction, women being hurt at home, women who had been abandoned, and women convinced that they had exhausted every good possibility their lives might once have contained.

Janet begged to differ.

She had an extraordinary capacity to look at someone whom circumstance—or sometimes the world itself—had already written off, and simply refuse that verdict. She did not sentimentalize people. She expected things from them. She treated them, from the first encounter, as persons of dignity and consequence: loved by God, capable of courage, and still possessed of a future.

A remarkable number of them discovered that she was right.

The lives touched by that work cannot really be counted. They include the women she counseled, the families she helped hold together, the children whose mothers chose to give them life, and now the children and grandchildren of those children. Her influence moves quietly through generations of people who may never know her name.

To many of the women she served, Janet was something close to a superhero, although she usually came outfitted with a cardigan, a casserole, and a box of tissues, rather than a cape and utility belt. She also possessed an alarming willingness to appear wherever she was needed before anyone had quite finished asking.

She did all of this because of a Christian faith that was neither ornamental nor abstract. Janet believed, quite simply, that every person she encountered had been deliberately made and infinitely loved; that no human life was accidental; and that despair was never entitled to the final word. She did not regard these propositions as especially complicated, nor was she much interested in being told they were unfashionable. She believed what she had learned first from the example of her Momma and Daddy and then from the faith taught in her church, and she lived those convictions as powerfully and relentlessly as she could.

She regarded retirement, and age and its indignities, as she regarded most other suggestions that she slow down: by politely ignoring them, without any apparent intention of complying.

Even after moving to Cary, North Carolina, in 2025, to be nearer her family, she remained deeply interested in the people and work of CPC. She remembered names. She asked questions. She prayed. She worried. She gave advice, whether or not advice had technically been requested.

And she remained fiercely independent. At 83 she still offered to host parties, bake cookies, and make potato salad (she was very proud of her potato salad), even when she was surrounded by people perfectly happy to do those things for her. She charmed the neighbors in her retirement community with her quick smile, generous faith, and seemingly inexhaustible supply of stories.

Janet was not particularly sentimental, and she would almost certainly have considered this obituary too long. But love tinged with grief sometimes gets expressed in loquacity.

She was preceded in death by her parents, John and Ida. She is survived by her sons, David Keim and his wife, Shell, of Cary, North Carolina, and Jonathan Keim of Patrick County, Virginia; her beloved grandchildren, Emma K. Newman (Addison), Sueanna K. Alter (Joseph), Noah Keim, Micah Keim, Asa Keim, and Joshua Keim; her even more beloved great-grandchildren, Esther, Edith, Charlotte, and Julian; her siblings, Johnny Miller (Ruth), Joe Miller (Christine), Jim Miller, Leon Miller (Sue), and Sam Miller; a vast and growing multitude of nieces and nephews, great-nieces and great-nephews, great-grandnieces and great-grandnephews, and their spouses; Joyce Green (Glenn), of Harrisonburg, Virginia, whom Janet welcomed into her home as a young woman and thereafter into her family, and Joyce’s daughters, Heidi and Deborah, to whom Janet was a grandmother in every important way; Rebecca Lefeber (Tony), of Chesapeake, Virginia, whom Janet loved, guided, and mothered for nearly five decades, and Rebecca’s children, Chrysler and Xzavier, who likewise knew Janet’s extraordinary grandmotherly love; the scores of others whom she gathered into her life and to whom she became, by affection rather than genealogy, a sister, mother, grandmother, or simply family; and several thousand people whom she never met but who are here anyway because of Janet’s love and sacrifice.

A visitation will be held Monday, September 7, from 5:00–7:00 p.m. at Smith & Williams Funeral Home/Kempsville, 4889 Princess Anne Road, Virginia Beach.

On Tuesday, September 8, the family will receive friends from 9:00–10:00 a.m. at Kempsville Baptist Church, 5204 Princess Anne Road, Virginia Beach, with the funeral service immediately following at 10:00 a.m. A brief graveside service and burial will follow at the Kempsville Amish-Mennonite Cemetery, 5205 Ambassador Drive, Virginia Beach, where Janet will be laid to rest beside her parents.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that memorial gifts be made to the Crisis Pregnancy Center of Tidewater, 1100 Madison Plaza, Suite 104A, Chesapeake, Virginia 23320, or through cpcfriends.org.

It is, after all, the only monument Janet ever really wanted. And she laid the foundations of it herself.

May her memory be eternal and may the Lord God number her among His saints.