Desperately seeking sisu: On family, resilience, and the desire to know where we come from

For years, my Finnish grandfather was a secret. Now, I'm trying to find him.

Sisu is a Finnish word, but it’s more than that - it’s also been described as a national identity. Roughly translated, sisu means resilience, grit, or determination.

“Do you remember Mom telling you some crazy story about us having a secret Finnish grandfather?” 

I blurted this out on a rainy November night in 1999 as my sister and I drove the hour-and-a-half home from the hospital ICU, where my mother was dying.

Kathreen’s eyes were glued to the highway, her windshield wipers struggling to keep up with the downpour. Still, on hearing this, she turned briefly toward me with her mouth open. “Oh, my God, YES!”

We’d just gotten the news that our mother, who’d become suddenly ill about a week before, was not likely to make it. “Your mother is dying,” a nurse had finally leveled with me, in the hallway outside her hospital room, where I’d gone to pace with my restless baby Isaac, then six weeks old, snuggled against my chest in the sling where he’d spent most of the past few days. “She isn’t going to get better.”

My mother as a young woman.

So the mood was somber as we made our way back that night, Kathreen driving, me riding shotgun, Isaac - thankfully asleep in his carseat - in the back. I fiddled with the radio and tried to think of something to say. And that’s when the memories of my mother telling me about our biological grandfather suddenly came spilling out.

As a little girl I’d heard lots of stories about my mother’s German dad. “But Grandpa wasn’t actually my father,” she’d told me once when I was about twelve. “Your grandfather was a Finnish man. Gramma fell in love with him, she got pregnant, and he left her. He paid her to go away, and I never met him.” 

I don’t remember feeling all that floored by the news at the time. While my mom told this story with a twinge of emotion in her voice, pretty much everything made her emotional; she could just as easily have gotten choked up over a movie plot or an old Willie Nelson song. And “Grandpa” had died before I was born, so swapping him out for another unknown man I’d never see anyway made little difference to me.

my mother with her mother and adoptive (not Finnish) father

Plus, my mother was prone to booze-soaked confessionals, ranging from slightly off-kilter, to full-on irrational, to diagnosable-level paranoia - and they’d become increasingly more common and less credible over the years. This bit of information was intriguing, and possibly plausible - but its delivery, and my mother’s typical frame of mind, inspired plenty of doubt. Plus, what could I ever expect to do with this data?

I filed the story away somewhere in my subconscious, then forgot all about it.

So when, a decade later, I turned to my older sister and asked her this question - did Mom ever tell you some crazy story about our secret Finnish grandfather? - I half-expected her to dispute it as nonsense and provide proof of why it couldn’t possibly be true. 

But no. Turned out, Mom had told her pretty much the same story.

My grandmother, around the time my mom was born

We each shared our versions, which hit many of the same marks: In late 1943, Gramma got pregnant. The eldest daughter of twelve, whose mother had died of tuberculosis when she and her younger sister were toddlers, she’d been raised in abject poverty by a ne’er-do-well father and overburdened stepmother, in the mining region known as the Copper Country in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. She’d already spent time in the tuberculosis sanatorium once by this point; she was living on her own and flat broke when she got pregnant with my mom.

Her options, to put it lightly, were limited.

My mother told us she’d loved the man, who was possibly a bit older than her and came from a well-to-do family. Gramma’s family, on the other hand, were neither educated nor well-to-do: her father Joe worked off and on as a laborer at the local copper mine and the large family was desperately poor. 

Ultimately, Mom said, her father had refused to marry Gramma or help raise the baby, money had exchanged hands; she’d moved on, broken-hearted but - classically Gramma - tough as nails and looking to the future.

My mom was born, and when she was a toddler, Gramma was admitted to a tuberculosis sanatorium, where she became a patient for over a year. When she got out, Gram married the son of the couple who’d cared for my mom, and they had four more kids - whom we’d always known as our full-blooded aunts and uncles.

My sister and I were silent, each floored by the resurrected memory we’d filed away. Mom died a few days later, and neither of us talked about our secret Finnish family again for a long time. Gramma wouldn’t likely want to talk about it, we figured, and with Mom gone, the secret seemed buried for good.

But the world has changed a lot since the 90’s. When I had my DNA tested by the then-fledgling company 23andMe as part of a blogger campaign in 2009, it was intriguing, but not surprising, to learn that I am nearly a quarter Finn despite having no known Finnish relatives. Over the years, as more and more people have joined the platform, I’ve been connected to dozens of potential third and fourth cousins, many still in Finland. I also joined Ancestry.com and ran a couple searches on a name my mother had shared with me over thirty years ago - a potential grandfather. All the hits were dead ends - too old, too young, not in the right place at the right time.

But over the past several months, the search picked up steam when I connected with a few different third cousins again on 23andMe, and began trying to identify a possible shared ancestor (this is not easy to do when you are trying to go three or four generations back, when many of your ancestors are still in their home country, and when families were enormous with lots of repeating - and frequently changing - names).

As it turns out, in the region with the highest concentration of Finns in the United States, there are an awful lot of Einos in the census rolls.

Again, it started to feel like the whole search might prove to be a dead end.

When I got my hands on a crucial document - Gramma’s medical records from the sanatorium - it helped connect some missing dots. Based on some information in that document and a hunch, I followed up with a lead that had initially seemed like a long shot: a similar name to the one we’d been searching for all along, spelled differently.

This time, it lined up.

My aunt and cousin - my mother’s half-sister and her daughter - jumped in on the search and together we started piecing together a possible narrative based on what we’d learned. My aunt had a photo of Gramma with four unknown people; three men and a woman. She’d always felt like there was some story behind that photo, she told me, and my cousin posted it to a Facebook group for the local area we believed him to be from. “We’re trying to identify the people in this photograph, which was probably taken around 1942-1943,” she said. Within minutes, a couple of commenters put a possible name to the man in the photo: the same guy we’d been looking for. Could it be true - could this family be my siblings’ and my direct connection to our Finnish ancestry?

Well, it’s very possible. But…so what?

I may never have proof of my connection with any particular family. And even if the evidence becomes smoking-gun solid, I’m not sure how I feel about inserting myself into the lives of people who would probably be much happier not to have this unflattering information about their loved one.

My putative grandfather is dead, and apparently wanted no part of my mother’s life to begin with. What difference does any of it make?

My mother, looking an awful lot like me at the same age. There’s still so much I don’t know about her.

Right now I’m trying to figure out where simple curiosity and the Scooby-Doo gang energy this search has created leaves off, and where some deeper need may pick up.

Maybe it’s a desire to understand my mother better: growing up, I learned next to nothing about her Finnish history.

But then, my mom didn’t grow up with a Finnish culture either, and anyway, having no understanding of my heritage isn’t unique to my mom’s biological father’s line: I also learned next to nothing about my Irish, English, or French-Canadian history, though this search has also inspired me to dig in deeper on each of those ancestral lines, with all the mysteries and stories they have to reveal.

Maybe this curiosity comes from a desire to understand myself better. I’ve always thought of myself as a gutsy, scrappy person, and maybe that’s partly why I find myself so fascinated by the knowledge of my Finnish heritage and the concept of sisu that seems to be every Finn’s birthright.

My grandmother as a young girl - barefoot and dirt-poor.

But Gramma - not herself a Finn - possessed a large amount of pluck in her own right. It’s not like the Finnish are the only ones who get to lay claim to resilience; they just coined the coolest word for it (although it admittedly doesn’t quite have the scented-candle-and-cashmere-sweater commercial appeal of the Danish hygge.)

If I really want to know where my resilience came from, I don’t have to go sneaking around graveyards with Daphne and Velma.

So if this case never gets solved with certainty, I’ll be OK with that. But a little part of me really wants to replace the question mark in my mental family tree with a name, and face, and story.

No, it won’t change anything about how I grew up, or where I came from, or the people who really did show up for my grandmother, and my mother, and for my siblings and me.

But at the end of the day, I guess everyone wants to know where they came from.

And somehow, somewhere, via one Eino or another, there’s a little part of my sisu story, just waiting to be uncovered.