Stina Nygren

Posted on | November 11, 2008 | Eric Peterson |

For people who have followed the Prosepct and Californian during the time our family owned the newspapers, some of our more seasoned readers will recall letters I sent home during my year as an AFS student in Skellefteå, Sweden. To call it “formative” is to do the term a grave injustice; I still consider it to be one of the most profound experiences of my life.
 
Stina Nygren, my second mother, died on Saturday, November 8, after a heart attack from which she never recovered, at her home in Umeå, her husband, Erland, and two sons, Åke and Per were with her.
 

Mrs. Nygren — Mama — was an amazing woman. On the day I arrived at her home, she made strawberry shortcake; a couple of days later, when Åke took me to a party to meet some of his friends, I was chewed out just as he was for coming in at an ungodly hour of the morning. That set the tone for my year; I was her third son — and her expectations and aspriations for me were no different from those she had for my two brothers.

She was relentless in her insistence that I learn to use my new native language; at the same time, every Friday was the day we spoke English in the house (Papa would be notoriously less vocal those days) so she could practice. If she suffered through the rheumatism she had, you almost never heard about it; she was not a woman who was going to let that get in her way. She encouraged us to do things we had never done; on one such instance, she reminded me that I hadn’t come halfway around the world just to spend my time doing homework. When winter (Skellefteå is a coastal city not all that far from the Arctic Circle) arrived, she took me to the store to buy a couple of pairs of winter pants; the jeans a California boy takes just weren’t going to cut it.

There are always regrets when someone you haven’t seen in years dies relatively suddenly; mine is that I wasn’t able to see her, or talk with her more frequently than I did. My adopted siblings and their father are blessed to have spent their lives with her.

Tak så mycket, Mama. Jag vill missa du.

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