A Life Well Lived
Darlene Oordt Dykema –85 and still going strong! Story By Christina Heintzelman cheintzelman@benchmarkmediallc.com
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“Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.” — Maya Angelou
Darlene – please call her “Dar” - Dykema grew up in Orange City, Iowa, a very conservative and insular Dutch community. She was the oldest of the three Oordt siblings. Darwin, the owner of Harrisburg Magazine, was the youngest sibling and he has revered Dar all his life. The reason Dar features prominently in this issue of Harrisburg Magazine is because she is a survivor of Hodgkins Lymphoma and this year the annual Simply The Best Gala’s fundraising focus will be on the Leukemia Lymphoma Society, with funds going to the local chapter here in Harrisburg. But this story is about a life well lived and the propensity of Dar’s 24 HARRISBURG MAGAZINE AUGUST 2022
spirit to keep moving forward. Dar’s paternal grandfather came to America all by himself at the age of thirteen. He had sold firewood on the canal in Holland and worked hard with little money to spare and decided that America may offer more opportunities. He learned five languages along the way: German, French, English, Dutch, and Frisian, which is a native language consisting of sixty dialects of the people of Friesland. Dar lived with her family in Orange City until the age of eighteen when she left for college at St. Joseph’s Mercy Hospital, Sioux City, Iowa. “This was an entirely different culture for me, people were much more open, and I was exposed to Catholicism after having only known the Reformed religion of Robert Schuler my entire life. The school was very ridged with no vacation, but I learned a lot,” she says. After nursing school in Sioux City, Dar returned to Orange City to
