Longed-For Reunion Turns Bittersweet

Gina Erickson dialed information and asked for listings under the name Iverson. There was a Keith in Burbank. That was a surprise. Perhaps, she thought, this would be a cousin.

Two days passed before she mustered the nerve to call. A woman answered. When a stranger calls, Sharon Iverson typically asks for a name and a purpose. This time she just turned to her husband of 22 years and said it was a young lady, asking for Keith Iverson.

Over the phone, Gina could hear the man speak to his wife. “I heard his voice and I knew,” she recalls.

They said their hellos. “Who is this?” the man asked.

“This is Gina. I think I’m your daughter.”

His first response was silence. Then Keith Iverson said: “Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for this call?”

*

When Gina Erickson found Keith Iverson, she was trying to locate her paternal grandparents. She had no hope of finding her father. Nearly two decades ago, when Gina was a second-grader living with her mother in Canada, they’d been led to believe that Keith Iverson had been killed in an airplane crash.

Gina called July 5, the day after Keith Iverson had been looking through some old photos, wondering what had become of his little girl. July 4 was her birthday.

“I said, ‘I just had my 26th birthday,’ ” Gina said.

“I know,” her father replied.

The reunion of daughter and father has been joyous and bittersweet. There is sadness in the fact that Gina is severely ill, suffering an advanced case of reflex sympathetic dystrophy syndrome (RSD). Gina’s concerns about her own mortality inspired the search that led to her father.

The reunion has healed some old wounds but opened others, revealing a painful family secret. Keith Iverson, who is 51 and works as a communications electrician for the Department of Water & Power, relived some of the anger he harbored toward Gina’s mother, his ex-wife, Toni. Even in the “euphoric” first phone call, he asked, “What has your mother told you about me?” expecting the worst. Gina, he says, “deflected that and said, ‘This is about you and me.’ ”

They’ve done a lot of talking since then, and Keith Iverson discovered it wasn’t Toni who kept him from seeing his daughter. It was somebody else--a fact that has been painful to absorb.

To begin at the beginning, Toni Erickson was 19 and Keith Iverson a few years older when they fell in love. Soon they were wed and soon the marriage was in trouble. As their marriage was collapsing, Toni learned she was pregnant.

Gina was born and Keith had visitation rights. There were happy times. Little Gina would tell her dad, “I love you bunches and bunches and bunches.” She’d say the same to her “Grammy.” Keith’s mother doted on Gina, her favorite grandchild.

Back then, there was plenty of friction between Keith and Toni--and Keith’s mom, to his dismay, usually sided with Toni. By Gina’s fifth birthday, Keith had married Sharon, and Toni had earned her teaching credential. Toni’s career led her and Gina to Hawaii, then New Mexico and ultimately to a remote town in British Columbia, far away from Keith, a Burbank native.

Keith says he lost contact with Gina and her mother in 1974, after they moved to Canada. “We had had some disagreements and so forth. And we just lost touch.”

Keith suspected that Toni had moved far away because she feared he and his wife wanted custody of Gina. He says he simply wanted to restore visitation. At one point, Keith consulted a lawyer who advised him that the best way to protect his interests was to locate Gina and abduct her.

“I was just not willing to go to those lengths. I felt I did not want to play tug-of-war over my daughter. I felt it would not be in her best interest.”

So Keith Iverson decided to back off and keep his number listed in the book. If Gina or her mother ever wanted to find him, he’d be there.

And it was only after Gina’s phone call that Keith painfully discovered the source of so much misunderstanding.

It was his own mother, Gina’s “Grammy.”

She died in 1991. Toward the end, she suffered from senile dementia. Keith now believes she had been mentally unstable for many years, though there had been no diagnosis.

“Basically my mother had a reality problem. My mother was, unfortunately, a meddlesome person. . . . She had a very robust imagination.”

His mother, Keith and Sharon say, liked to interfere in her children’s lives. It was she who misrepresented his interests in seeking his daughter. And, after a close friend of Keith’s had died in an airplane crash, she notified Toni’s mother that Keith had died.

He theorizes that his mother had a bizarre, twisted motive for her bizarre, twisted actions. In the past, she had allied herself with Toni against her own son, only to watch Toni take Gina far away. Perhaps if Toni believed that Keith was dead, his mother would be able to be reunited with her beloved granddaughter.

Keith Iverson finds himself wrestling with complex emotions. “It’s very upsetting to me, but it’s a fact of life: I feel like my mother betrayed me.”

*

The reunion has caused much more joy than pain. When Gina finally told him what her mother had to say about him, he was pleasantly surprised. “I was quite touched. Toni really raised Gina to look at the positive side of things. Her mother has done a wonderful job. She’s just a delightful, charming young lady.”

At the same time, learning about Gina’s illness, which requires her to use a wheelchair, has been difficult. “It was heartbreaking,” he says. He well remembered the little girl “was always dancing around, doing some sort of performance.”

Yet, he adds, “she’s been such a spiritual inspiration to me with her lust for life. She’s just so enthusiastic. She gets excited about looking at trees, architecture, a squirrel. She just drinks in life . . . When I’m with her, I forget about the disease.”

Gina, he says, “has filled a void in his life.” She says the same of her father.

“Some people grow up under the same roof and they’re complete strangers,” Gina says. “We have the opportunity as adults to develop and nurture a friendship, a healthy bond.”

Keith and Sharon Iverson had Thanksgiving dinner with Gina and Toni in Vista. Several years ago, they had moved there from Canada to be closer to Toni’s parents. On Monday, Gina is going to Burbank to see her “Grampa” for the first time in more than 20 years, the widower of the woman they struggle to understand.

Looking over some old photos, Keith Iverson found a poem his mother had written for Gina. There was one line that stood out, from Grammy to Gina.

“I love you bunches and bunches and bunches,” it said.

Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays.