Ingegerd (Lidenmark) Jean

Elna INGEGERD Lidenmark Jean, beloved wife, mother, grandmother, sister, aunt, friend, nurse, missionary, storyteller, teacher, and mother figure to many, passed away peacefully at her home in Needham, Massachusetts, on January 15, 2025.  

Ingegerd (pronounced: ing - eh – yaerd, rhymes with dared) lived a long and remarkable life and had a lasting, positive impact on the lives of many people around the world, from classmates and missionary friends to the communities she served, colleagues, her own caregivers, large extended family, and many a random stranger. Her warmth and reach extended far and wide. She was generous and resourceful, and she was always hospitable, running essentially an open house for the last 60 years. She was competitive, tough and stubborn, and she was gracious in victory and defeat. She was a great conversationalist and reveled in new friendships hatched from simply striking up a chat with a stranger (an opportunity she rarely passed up). She had a prankster’s sense of humor and could find something to laugh about even in the most difficult situations. In fact, one of her last utterances as she lay dying was a wisecrack about running off in the night. In a sense, that is what she did.  

Ingegerd had been in at-home hospice care since late October. She was alert and engaged throughout November and December, delighting in the attention of many visitors, calls and messages, and in her daily games of Rummikub. She was able to enjoy Christmas Eve and New Years’ Day with family, and she remained herself to the end.

Her family is deeply grateful to her skilled, loving and incredibly dedicated team of friends, clinical staff, home care providers, and hospice staff who helped care for her. Collectively they enabled her to enjoy a rich and fulfilling final year of life.

Ingegerd was born May 6, 1930, in the rural southern village of Ryaberg, Sweden. She was the fourth of six children of the local Halmstad-Bolmen Railway stationmaster, Frans Johan Lidenmark, and his wife, Karin Hildegard Lidenmark (Johansson). She also had a “war sister” – a Finnish evacuee, about her own age, who was taken in by the family and would become her lifelong close friend.

She attended the local one-room schoolhouse through grade 5. When the family moved down the line to Lidhult, where her father had been promoted, she attended the slightly larger school there. According to an account by one of her brothers, she was a top student. For further schooling, she went to the nearest coastal city, Halmstad, where she and her right-aged siblings lived in an apartment during the week, returning to Lidhult on the weekends.

In the early 1950’s she completed a three-year nursing program in south central Sweden, followed by two years of practical training as a surgical nurse. She and her nursing-school classmates kept a “shared journal circle” for over forty years, and she was delighted when a group of them traveled to the States to visit her in 1997. She also completed a year of training at the mission school of the Swedish Alliance Mission, having felt since her teenage years a calling to missionary service. Her dream had been to work in Salaqi in northern China at a Swedish orphanage for girls. With China closed to missionaries, she settled for Hong Kong.

As further preparation, she went to London to study English. While there she sought out the British missionary Gladys Aylward, whom she met with again several times over the years in Hong Kong and was clearly inspired by. In 1957 an opportunity arose for Ingegerd to travel to Hong Kong by boat with a Swedish family returning to their mission after a furlough. So, she cut short her English studies, got ordained as a missionary, and joined the family for the train trip to Genoa. She often recounted the eye-opening boat journey from Genoa, which had port calls in Naples, Port Said, Aden, Karachi, Bombay, Colombo, and Singapore, before finally arriving in Hong Kong one month later.

In Hong Kong, she was assigned to work in the refugee camp in an area known as “Rennie’s Mill” in Junk Bay. The missionaries already there had been evicted from China in 1949-50. Her first lodging was in a boarding house in Wan Chai, close to her Cantonese language classes. Throughout her subsequent life in the U.S., she loved surprising Chinese people she encountered with some Cantonese banter, unexpected from an old lady with a Swedish accent. She laughed at her early efforts at Chinese, especially the time she thought she had perfectly delivered a children’s story about how God’s love is color blind, only to find out a week later that no one had understood a word.

Ingegerd worked in Rennie’s Mill for two years. She continued to study Cantonese, managed a small business dealing in handicrafts by some of the refugees, worked in a health clinic, and served as a delivery nurse in a maternity ward. Meanwhile, she had visited Macau a few times and now felt called to work there, where there seemed to be a greater need. When the opportunity arose, she moved to Macau.

Her work in Macau started with a church that had a small kindergarten. She and the pastor wanted to create a real school for children “from the slum area.” They started by buying a rundown apartment. Then the apartment upstairs. Then the entire second floor and the roof. Eventually they had two preschool classes and a primary school up to grade 6, with about 450 kids.

The school was the site of one of her favorite stories. She had bought a washing machine with some money she had been given to take a vacation and famously used it to mix large quantities of donated powdered milk, sugar and Ovaltine each morning, as most of the kids came to school hungry. With another donation, this time of flour, she hired a baker who made breakfast buns each day. A subsequent, large donation funded a stable, daily feeding program – half the kids got lunch, and the other half dinner.

She was an effective fundraiser, securing donations from, for example, visiting businessmen who were directed to her by friends and consular staff in Hong Kong for a “tour of the sites” in Macau. They always somehow ended up visiting the slums and the school, and invariably they were deeply moved and asked how they could help. She also appealed to audiences on speaking tours and to readers of “letters from abroad”-type articles in periodicals back home in Sweden. Sometimes she inspired “in-kind” donations directed specifically to her. For example, she suffered from chronic back problems and was operated on – many years apart – by two surgeons who, unbeknownst to her, were world-famous in their fields, one at Queen Mary Hospital in Hong Kong, and one at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston – free of charge.

Recalling her dream about the Salaqi orphanage, she was determined to establish one in Macau. With help from the Lutheran World Federation, a board representing the Swedish Consulate in Hong Kong, Swedish businessmen and missionaries, and others, her team purchased a villa at 3D Avenida Horta e Costa, which they named IKA Casa, in honor of key Swedish sponsor ICA Kuriren, a widely read “housewives” magazine. The facade of the villa is still there today, the rest (and the entire leafy neighborhood) replaced by block apartments. She stayed in touch with many children from those days her entire life. She also spearheaded the establishment of a home for impoverished elderly people.

In Macau she met her future husband, Frank Jean, a preacher and ex-soldier from Shanghai. For one speaking tour, he was planning to go to the U.S., stopping first in Japan and Korea. With help and encouragement from one of Frank’s sisters, Ingegerd went to meet him in Japan (with rings in hand!) and, wouldn’t you know it, she got engaged. In Korea, missionary and relief-organization friends threw an engagement party for them. They were married in Los Angeles in 1967 and traveled to Sweden to introduce Frank to Ingegerd’s family. Then they returned to Hong Kong (civil unrest in Macau made it unsafe for them there) and made arrangements to move to Seoul, where they had decided to establish an ecumenical group serving university students. They had two children while living in Korea, and they made many lasting friendships there.

In 1971, the family moved to the Boston area, where Frank felt he had been called to serve. Ingegerd passed the Massachusetts R.N. and English proficiency exams (she thought preparing for and taking exams was fun) and took a job at Weston Manor nursing home, where she worked for 15 years. She returned to Korea, Hong Kong and Macau many times over the years to see her friends, and she hosted many of them back in the States. Outside of nursing and raising her children, her new mission, as it were, became to serve as a sort of buffer and counter-presence to Frank. The writer of a thoughtful condolence message recently noted that Ingegerd brought “warmth and relatability” with “balance and grace” that allowed visitors to “just be real.” Another wrote that “[Frank] challenged us, but it was [Ingegerd] who nurtured us” and “who cushioned the journey for us and brought a relaxed sweetness to Frank’s intense faith. She always had a ready smile and a lovely sense of humor; she knew when to roll her eyes and make everybody laugh.” 

In her later years, she remained a “connector,” that person who stays in touch with everyone and causes people to stay in touch with each other as a result, and without whom bonds sometimes fade. She embraced emerging technology to do so, learning email and web browsing on an original iMac, as well as texting and making video calls on her smartphone. She never stopped making new friends, from people in her exercise class, to drivers for the local senior transportation service, receptionists at her various clinics, and so on. She organized afternoon coffees and ladies’ luncheons, and she loved hosting people on her flower-filled porch.

Her greatest love was her grandchildren and she spent (and angled for) as much time with them as possible. She was always available for games, puzzles, handicrafts, baking, stories or some grandmotherly comfort. Unsurprisingly, she talked about them to everyone.

Ingegerd leaves her children, Paul-Johan Jean (Carmen DeMarco), and Anna-Carin Hart; grandchildren, Sophia Mangan (Josh Mangan), Olivia Jean, Henry Jean, Zoe Hart, Max Hart, Guy Hart, and Caroline Jean; sister, Gunvor Jonsson; and many nieces and nephews and their children. She was predeceased by her husband, Frank Jean; sister, Kirstin Dahlström; and brothers Ingemar, Lennart and Tore Lidenmark.

Burial was private. A gathering of friends and family will be held at Noon on Saturday, April 12, in the Boston area at a location to be announced, following a brief 11:00 a.m. grave-side service at Needham Cemetery (weather permitting). All are welcome. Please contact Paul Jean if you wish to attend.

In lieu of flowers, the family suggests donations to relief organizations, such as World Vision (https://www.worldvision.org/donate), Care (https://www.care.org), Läkarmissionen (https://www.lakarmissionen.se/gavoshop/), Lutheran World Federation (https://lutheranworld.org), Direct Relief (https://www.directrelief.org), or to her church, Crossroads Community Church in Framingham, MA (https://crossroadsframingham.com/home/giving/), or volunteering time at a local relief organization.

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