Chapter 4: Losing Nils
By 1933 Nils couldn’t be sure of a steady job. That summer he often complained of headaches. He knew he would be laid off again over the winter. And I was pregnant again.
In October his headaches got worse and he couldn’t go to work one day. He stayed in bed and asked me to call the doctor and the company he worked for. I went down to the grocery store and did so. The doctor came after a while and talked to him and understood what was wrong, I guess. The doctor told him to stay in bed and he would come back the next day. He may have left medicine for Nils. Nils felt so upset that after a while he got up and ran out of the house in his night shirt down to the doctor’s office at Nicollet and 43rd, six blocks away. The doctor called an ambulance and took him to the University Hospital. He was there two or three days until they couldn’t keep him any longer. Then he was taken to the State Hospital in Rochester.
The girls and I took the bus down to see him, after a while. He was so glad to see the girls, and they to see their dad. James, then twenty-one months, was left with a neighbor. Nils wanted us to stay longer than a couple hours but it took time to get back to the bus station. We stayed as long as we could.
Nils was there six or seven weeks. He wrote me a couple letters. He felt so bad, blaming himself for everything, for things not going well. I told him that wasn’t so, and we loved him. He seemed to feel better. The first letter I got he said, “Now I believe as you do, that Jesus died on the cross for our sins.” He was so thankful and believed. That was the best news I ever had. The Jacobsons were all baptized but hadn’t been brought up to go to church.
I went down once later alone. He was worse and didn’t know me all the time. It wasn’t long after that he took a turn and died. It was December 22, 1933. He was thirty-three years old. Doctors didn’t know enough about brain tumors at that time. A friend of ours had the same thing a year or so later. The doctors operated on her, but she died under the operation.
Nils’ funeral was held in the afternoon of December 24th. It was a sad Christmas for all of us. I had a letter from my dad after Nils got sick. Dad wrote, “It’s like a cold clammy fog laying over the prairie.”
Margit Mindrum 