A Daughter and Father Find Each Other Again

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 was a cousin.

Two days passed before she mustered the nerve to dial the number. A woman answered. When a stranger calls, Sharon Iverson usually asks for their name and their purpose. This time she 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 had been told that Gina’s father had been killed in an airplane crash.

Gina placed the call the day after her birthday last July 4. “I said I just had my 26th birthday, and he said, ‘I know.’ ” The day before, he told her, he’d been looking through some old photos, wondering what had become of his little girl.

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. Keith Iverson, who is 51, recalls feeling “choked up” and “euphoric” in that first conversation but also unable to put aside the anger he harbored toward Gina’s mother, his ex-wife Toni.

“What has your mother told you about me?” Keith recalls asking. Nothing good, he figured. Gina, he says, “deflected that and said, ‘This is about you and me.’ ”

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. “I wanted to join the Peace Corps and he was an early yuppie,” Toni says. 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.” She’d say the same to Keith’s mother, her “Grammy,” who 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 5th birthday, Keith had married again 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, now a communications electrician with the Department of Water & Power, 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 because she feared Keith and his wife were trying to seek custody of Gina. He says he simply wanted to restore visitation.

A lawyer, he says, once advised him to locate and abduct Gina. Not wanting to play tug-of-war over his daughter, 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.

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,” who had 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 . . . and she had a very robust imagination.”

After a close friend of Keith’s had died in an airplane crash, Grammy bizarrely notified Toni’s mother that Keith had died.

Keith Iverson finds himself wrestling with complex emotions. The last two years of her life, he had visited her almost daily. “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 who “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.”

“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 Iverson has since joined the board of “Wings of Joy,” a nonprofit RSD awareness group Gina established in October. The Iversons spent Thanksgiving with Gina and Toni in the San Diego County community of Vista. Several years ago, they had moved there from Canada to be closer to Toni’s parents. Recently, Gina was reunited with her “Grampa”--the widower of the woman they now 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.

“She loves me bunches and bunches,” Grammy said of her Gina.