Dear Father is a memoir of one year of the life of Shelly Fankhauser. Experiencing the death of her grandfather and husband, she is forced to reexamine her basic belief system as a New Zealand Maori LDS woman. Through her losses and the process of her grief, she discovers the identity that she was struggling to find did not come from her culture or her religion as she had once thought, but from within herself.Dear Father is an autobiographical account of finding inner strength and discovering hope.