Ingrid Ann-Christin Hahn, 1945-2012

A creamy envelope with unfamiliar handwriting lay on the floor of my apartment when I got home last Wednesday. How wonderful, a letter! I thought. There was no return address, but the stamps were Swedish. I set it aside, getting a glass of water so I could sit down and savor this note from some unknown person, maybe someone I had known when I lived in Sweden but hadn’t heard from for years.

It was a shock to read the first line: “I’m sorry I have to give you some bad and tragic news.” And as my eyes scanned the note and registered that it was my beloved Swedish teacher who had passed away, I refused to believe it, forcing myself to go back and read very slowly to correct the mistake.

But no, Ann-Christin is gone.

I still don’t believe this is possible. Maybe I will believe it when her annual wall calendar from Sweden fails to appear. She always sent it wrapped in traditional Swedish Christmas wrap with ‘tomtar’ (elves) and red curly ribbon. Always the same greeting, never a letter. It was a Christmas tradition in our home, my gift from the Swedish teacher I had when I was 19 years old and living in Sweden for the first time.

In 1975, a group of us students from various University of California campuses traveled together to Europe, enroute to our universities in Norway and Sweden. We spent a week traveling to Paris, Copenhagen and Oslo before splitting into two groups, one which would stay in Bergen for the year, the rest of us who would be in Lund. We all had ‘language camp’ for nine weeks to prepare us for our studies. Our camp began in Malung, a small town in the heart of Sweden. We bused in from Oslo, and it took several hours; the road was windy and the bus was hot. At some point the brakes started smoking. I remember we were all jet-lagged, probably hung over, but excited about finally getting to our country of residence for the next year. We met our teachers that first evening. Ann-Christin was in charge of our group, the most advanced students who’d been lucky enough to have Swedish at our home universities. I can’t remember that first meeting, but I do remember hearing her voice for the first time and thinking “Oh no, I can’t understand her!” Ann-Christin was from Simrishamn in Southern Sweden and spoke ‘skånska,’ a dialect that the rest of Sweden likes to make fun of, and, I blush to say it, I had made fun of myself.

But once I got used to her strange ‘r’s and her dipthongs, I soon realized that she was an excellent teacher. You have to be to keep the attention of eight students for six hours a day, five days a week. We raced through the material. We never spoke English. (In fact, I can’t remember hearing Ann-Christin speak English until years later.) We studied grammar, did skits (I still remember a hysterical one in which the father of the family insisted on reading the phone book to everyone else), baked from Swedish recipes, had daily preposition quizzes (which always had a picture of Snoopy saying something encouraging), wrote essays, and talked, talked, talked. I not only credit her with taking me far down the road of fluency, but also with modeling excellent teaching. If I am a good foreign language teacher, it’s largely her doing.

Her care didn’t end in August, when we dispersed to our various dormitories and our new lives. She was always happy to have us come for tea, and different constellations of students would walk down to her part of town to visit her and her boyfriend, Christer, and feel like there was life and warmth beyond being a somewhat lonely and maybe slightly scared exchange student. She called us her ‘smågrisar’, her little pigs, and so we would bring her marzipan pigs, drawings of pigs, pig souvenirs of all kinds. We even made her a gingerbread ‘doll house’ with pig figures representing all eight of us. I later found out that we were the last nine-week class she had, and that she started teaching English after that. I don’t think it was because we were a tough crowd, but I think it may have had something to do with why we seemed to have a special place in her heart.

Over the years, Ann-Christin and I kept up a regular correspondence. She never wrote a lot, and she never said much about herself. She talked about baking cookies, about the snowy weather, about other students she had heard from. When she and Christer broke up and she married her high-school sweetheart, Tommy, moved back to Simrishamn and had a little boy, it was communicated in just a couple sentences. She was a very private person, and the fact that she hated having her picture taken probably had something to do with this.

We talked about my coming to visit her for a longer period of time so we could go to a medieval fair in Southern Sweden. I finally got the time to see her for a whole day in the summer of 2011, though it didn’t correspond with the fair. The day was magical. We met for breakfast at the bakery I had worked in during the summer of 1976, Ramklints Konditori. Then we drove around southern Sweden, taking in Ales Stenar first (Sweden’s Stonehenge), then, after it started to rain too much to be outside, having coffee in a former manor near the coast, visiting her husband in his bookstore, and stopping briefly at their home which was an amazing restored farmhouse from the 1700s in the village of Gladsax. She showed me the archaeological dig next door which was uncovering the remains of a castle from the 1300s. We talked about our families, our worries for our children, the things we found important in life. I saw new sides to Ann-Christin, and I looked forward to more visits with her in the future, especially if I was going to be on the same continent finally.

We had pizza for dinner and then walked to the bus back to Lund. I wasn’t allowed to pay my fare with cash so Ann-Christin paid it, smiled and told me not to worry, hugged me and waved goodbye. It was the last time I saw her, though I had no way of knowing it, no prescience about it at all.

I’m so grateful for that time together. It felt like we were no longer student and teacher, but friends. Apparently she got the cancer diagnosis five months later, a month after her final calendar arrived. She died in July, while I was bustling around trying to get ready to move to Finland. I sent her a birthday card telling her about my arrival and wondering if I could see her in the week between Christmas and New Year. This must have been why her husband wrote to me, although I can't imagine the pain he suffered doing so.

Ann-Christin is gone. I could say something brave and appreciative about her legacy and her students, but I just feel sad, bereft and shocked. She was so young, only 67. And I didn't thank her enough.