FINAL YEARS

Around 1985 new students ceased coming to Fredheim: Ingeborg was nearly blind. During the war, the Nazi police Gestapo had damaged her ear during torture, and now she heard less and less and found it increasingly hard to walk.

An aging Ingeborg - but before the illness really set in.

Her family made sure that she could stay at Fredheim during the last four years of her life.

All her life Ingeborg had used every second - now she was bound to a chair and lonely in her physical decay. But until her very last moments she enjoyed being read for. The night before she died, she heard several of the traditional Fredheim Christmas songs again. Not sure whether she was conscious, the boy singing by her deathbed hoped that she could hear him. He felt that it was up to him to give her a final "thank you" for what she had taught him and everybody else who wanted to learn from her.

Ingeborg Refling Haged died in 1989.