Dear Dad

The spiffy young men in the photo above are my father, Oiva, and his brother, Waino. Dad is on the left. It’s not surprising that there’s a dog in the picture with them. Even the dog is beautiful and seems to be posing for the photo. Oiva (pronounced OY-vah) was a dog whisperer—he had invisible charm that every dog could sense. When I’d arrive at Mom and Dad’s with my two Maltese dogs, they would claw at the door to get in and then speed like white lightning right by Grandma in the kitchen to get to Grandpa in the great room. Mom would say, “What am I—chopped liver?” We’d hug, laughing. My pups were astute judges of character. My dear Dad has been gone for twelve years now, and I feel the loss of him every day. Missing him has made me really aware of how people keep walls and borders around themselves.

Lately, I’m thinking about how we fail so much of the time to let those close to us know we love and need them. How we fail, too much of the time, to even see each other in our innate wholeness. Why do we do that? Is it built into our genes? Cultural, and therefore learned? I’m thinking, especially, about dads and daughters, but I’d roll grand-dads into the mix. Grandfathers have an important role to play in a young woman’s life, too. There are hard to cross borders between all of us, but especially, it seems to me, between fathers and daughters.

I spent my career teaching composition, creative writing, and literature on the college level. When you teach writing, students open up to you. When they’re really writing, they write what’s in their hearts. That’s especially true when a teacher is still quite young herself and seems rather like a peer to them. I still remember one young woman from my first year of teaching after I’d finished graduate school. She was, by the standards of Western culture, beautiful. She was smart.

She could have done anything.

But she suffered intensely from insecurity. I remember her physically shaking, as she told me that her father thought she was useless, that she would never amount to anything. He had told her so. She carried a burden, given to her by her dad, of thinking that the only thing she had going for her was her beauty, and that didn’t amount to much.

It struck me as so hurtful and narrow, knowing, as I do, that through the centuries there have been, and still are, matrilineal peoples who trace their lineage though the female line and determine inheritance through it. Women in those societies are far from useless. It’s been thirty-five years since I spoke with that student, but I still think about her and the painful cavern between her and her father. I hope she found her way to a fulfilling life, that both she and he found their way to healing what hurt.

Maybe you identify with my student. You grew up feeling inadequate, unaware or disbelieving of your own personhood and gifts. Maybe you identify with her father, not knowing how to honor the ones you love for who they are. Maybe you identify with both, unsure of how to cross the gender and generational divides.

It’s important that we cross them, more than ever.

Much of what I write centers on my family and the small town I grew up in. I have no interest in writing nostalgia. Perhaps it would be comfortable to write sunshine and light, ignoring shadows. But that’s not truth. Life is hard—love is hard. My father was and in many ways still is the most important man in my life. But we were of different generations, with different personalities.

Dad could talk to anyone—he loved the county fair and the Fourth of July. People everywhere. I’m the opposite. I’m happy at home, an introvert who can rise to extroversion when I need to, but who will go home afterwards and lock the door.

Oiva’s life experience was very different from mine. I was a town kid, went to college, worked as an academic. Dad was farm-born, worked as a logger before military service and as an underground miner when he returned from the South Pacific. But he believed in education and supported his kids’ going to college, though he’d not gone himself.

His life wasn’t without trial. Perhaps his biggest challenge was heart disease. It began with a heart attack in his late fifties and turned into heart failure at the end. My dear dad! He was stoic, not a complainer. But he was also stubborn. He became more conservative as he aged and liked at times to say things he knew would rile the waters, things I often wondered if he even believed. I grew up in the Sixties—I’m more liberal, inclined to quiet activism, and about as stubborn.

You’d think the divide between us would be deep. But Oiva’s down-to-earth ways, his earth-connected sensibilities, have shaped me since the cradle. I loved him dearly. The year I was thirty-seven, I decided I needed to tell him that. I sent him a letter, which I was later surprised to find in a box of family photos that came to me after my mom died. Finding the paper, unfolding it, I had a jolt of surprise. He had kept my letter! The words from my heart had meant something to him.

Holding that letter now is like looking into a time capsule. It was disconcerting when I realized that Dad was several years younger when I sent it than I am now. With a mere glance, those words on paper announce my age at the time. My penmanship is small and contained. The hand holding the pen was in its prime, not hampered by the arthritis in my thumb that has made my writing larger now and sends sporadic individual letters into strange, pain-induced loops.

Not surprisingly, I understand my father’s shift toward cantankerousness more than I did at thirty-seven. I feel the press of advancing age myself, frustrated by the decline in my physical capabilities, haunted just below consciousness by the shortening number of days ahead of me.

Still, there’s value in reflecting on the letter written by my younger self. I’ve been thinking I should share it, for all fathers and daughters. It’s scary to share something so close to my inner being. But when I start to feel nervous about something my inner voice tells me I should write, I take heart from the painter Georgia O’Keeffe, who said, “I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life—and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.”

Fathers and daughters are in a strange place just now, with so much happening to drive wedges between them. It’s surreal to me that, in 2024, in this era of medical and technological advances bordering on the miraculous, there are people so backward-thinking, they want to empower heartless government to make our daughters’ decisions, right down to choices around birth control and whether and when to have children.

Daughters need their fathers to stand up for them against bureaucrats and political types who would diminish their lives. In turn, fathers need daughters to see and cherish and return the love they have for them. I’m closing with my letter to Oiva in hopes that it will move other fathers and daughters to speak, or at least write to each other the things that are hard to say but very much in their hearts.

* * * * *

December 17, 1991

Dear Dad,

Because it’s Christmas, and because I love you, I want to write you a note saying all the things I always want to say to you but seldom do.

When I was a little girl, I loved following you around and doing things with you. I was as happy doing “boy things” as I was girl things—and when I grew up, I think I incorporated a lot of masculine characteristics into my personality. Or maybe they’re just Oiva characteristics. I tend to do exactly what I want to do—and convention be damned. It’s caused me a little bit of trouble in my love life, because not many men can deal with an opinionated woman—but then I found Bruce, and he does just fine.

One of the saddest things for me in growing up was that we (you and I) got shy around one another. Maybe it was because I moved so far away for so long, maybe it was because I always dated academics who didn’t know how to talk to anyone who didn’t receive 15 degrees. I bet you’ll be surprised when I tell you that I loved learning so much because of you! I watched you read—and read—and read—and I learned how great it is to be able to know things, and to talk about them. You were always showing me plants and animals and stars and what not, and you had this way of talking about them that bordered on poetry. I may have gotten most of my love for literature from Mom, but you’ve had a lot to do with my general love of learning.

Anyway, I want you to know that I admire you. You’re a good and kind man—and wonderfully eccentric. God broke the mold after he made you, Dad. I hope you realize how utterly true that is! I hope you don’t feel hurt when I walk away from noisy discussions. One of the characteristics of my personality is that I can’t stand conflict of any kind, so I stay out of it. Arguing, as much as other people like it, will never be my way. But even if I walk away for a while, I love you dearly. My life has never been the same since that January of ’82, when you were so ill. When the heart attack happened to you, I put my childhood forever behind me.

I wish I could be home this Christmas, but I can’t be in two places at once, as talented as I am. I’m glad you’re my father, Oiva. As you know, I think there’s a transcendent power, and I thank it that it made you my dad.

Love, Donna

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