As Gina's father in her early California years, I was still a graduate student at Stanford University. Gina quickly built a reputation as being cute, precocious, responsible, and possessing a mind of her own. For instance, she started reading at the age of 2 but during the year that followed, she just decided she had no interest in reading. She really loved her brother, Evan, when he arrived two years later. Gina gladly helped look out for Evan, but when he did something he didn't like, she did not hesitate to tell him. When Gina was only 3, we moved to Minnesota because I got a job at the University of Minnesota as an assistant professor of sociology. Shortly after arriving, we moved to Edina, because it had the public school system with the best reputation. About the time Gina started to school, a new "open school" option became available. She was perfect for the open school because she naturally wanted to learn and create things on her own. When Gina was only seven, Mary and I divorced but I continued to pick up Gina and Evan every Wednesday afternoon and Saturday night, which in those days was called co-parenting. In 1973, divorce was not as common, and the co-parenting arrangement made it harder for them to keep up their friendships as they were away from their home neighborhoods so much. While both Gina and Evan coped with the split household well, I could see that it was at times a struggle for them. Having just turned 30, I was not an experienced father, but Gina made it easier, requiring less direction. My favorite sports at the time were snow skiing and water skiing. We often went snow skiing together on weekends and during her senior year at Edina High; Gina was on the school's slalom racing team. That year both she and Evan also coached soccer. Gina was accepted to the most competitive colleges in the United States and chose Harvard University. But even though she had been accepted, she decided to take a year off and try living in a totally different culture. Under the American Friends Service student exchange program, she moved to Parma, Italy, living with an average Italian family and attending school. It was a hugely transformative for her as she had to rapidly learn Italian to understand what went on in class. Being a beautiful young woman of only 17, she also had to learn to enjoy but keep the young Italian men from overwhelming her. Most of all, she was lonely and had to adjust to a totally her world. Without a strong sense of what she wanted from life, she would not have continued to grow into a mature young adult that year. Her Mother and I were both very proud of her tenacity and independence. Her five Harvard years were similar. She took a year off to work and travel, largely because her boyfriend Dave did so, but otherwise she steam rolled steadily ahead in completing her degree in applied science in 1988 in good standing. I very proudly attended her graduation, trying to get an understanding of the challenges she had surmounted in order to complete such a touch program. Partly because she was tired of school and partly because she liked to travel the less-traveled paths, she chose to skip graduate school and go directly into the job market. For almost five years, she lived in Seattle and worked in a healthcare management consulting group. Most of the time she worked with hospital administrators in Hawaii and the western states, helping them to improve their healthcare management. Seeing how women were treated in the workplace during the late 1980s convinced her to go back to school and become a doctor, a path her grandfather Anderson had been pushing her towards for years. My approach to parenting was to give Gina and Evan full responsibility for their own choices of school, job, career and friends. I never expected Gina to actually take her first job as an MD in a clinical teaching program. It gave us one more thing about which to talk. It also gave me another reason to be proud of her. In the meantime, Nancy Kehmeier and I got married in 1990, giving Gina a stepmother. Over the years, Nancy became more and more like a friend than a Mother. After all, Nancy is only 14 years older than Gina, but more than that, they began to do things together like shopping and just talking about personal things. Eventually, the three of us started doing more together as a group. In 2005, Gina started joining us for an annual spring vacation in Mexico. She was going to join us this month in Cancun and next year in Costa Rica. She also returned for a weekend to our home in Minnesota at least once a year. Ironically, we felt more and more like a family the older we were getting. I was proud of Gina throughout her life and now in her death. After setting up the memorial website, tributes came in from her friends that made me realize that there were many things that I did not know about her. As I put together 100s of photos for a memorial slide presentation, I realized that there were time periods like her year in Italy and her years in Seattle when did not communicate often and I did not know enough about what she had been going through. Perhaps that kind of distance is in the nature of one's child becoming an independent adult. However, I wished now that she had told us more about her professional life, her friendships, and the things that stressed her. A daughter tends to be closer to her mother than her father. Because of the contentious divorce, Gina and Evan used a defense strategy of not talking about one parent to the other, so I missed out on a lot of her early life. In the last 10 years, thanks to Nancy, we spent a lot of time together, but even then, only occasionally would she open up deeply and reveal her soul, and then more to Nancy than to me. As I have been organizing photos of her life I came to realize that I mourn not just for her as she died but for her an innocent young girl, a maturing college girl, and a young, beautiful professional, caring woman. Gina completed her residency in Ob/Gyn at the U of Texas in Dallas and continued working there on the clinical faculty for five years. Then she moved to the New Jersey Medical School in Newark doing basically the same thing until last month. When she died she was just in the middle of moving to a new job at Cambridge Hospital with faculty affiliation at Harvard. She always treasured her Harvard years and continued throughout her adult life to help by interviewing Harvard applicants. But a full circle return to Harvard was not meant to be. It took months to not think daily of my mother after she died. It might take years with Gina, but that is the nature of dying young and before one's time. At least I know I will always be her Dad and that I was in small ways responsible for the tremendous contribution she has provided compassionately to thousands and thousands of women and mothers who needed care. Ron