ROCHESTER, Minn. — In a quiet ceremony at Assisi Heights on Monday, November 24, 2025 a piece of literary history began its final journey home.

For more than 60 years, a modest blue-cloth copy of The Old Man and the Sea has sat in the archives of the Sisters of St. Francis, unbeknownst to the world. Inside the cover is an inscription from the author, Ernest Hemingway, written just days before his death.

Yesterday, the Sisters formally gifted that book to the Nobel Prize Museum in Stockholm, Sweden.

"We cared for Ernest Hemingway during a difficult chapter of his life," said Sister Marisa McDonald, archivist for the Franciscan Sisters, during the presentation. "This inscription reflects the gratitude he felt toward Sister Immaculata. We are honored to ensure it is preserved and shared with the world."

The book’s journey from a bedside at St. Marys Hospital to the home of the Nobel Prize is a story of chance, scholarship, and a 100-year-old nun’s memory.

A Message of Defiant Hope

The book was originally inscribed on June 16, 1961, to Sister Immaculata (born Helen Elizabeth Hayes), a psychiatric nurse supervisor at St. Marys Hospital who cared for the author during his treatment for depression.

Written in a hand weakened by illness, the inscription reads: “To Sister Immaculata — this book, hoping to write another one as good for her when my writing luck is running well again… and it will.”

Hemingway died by suicide just 16 days later.

The artifact remained hidden until May 2021, when Dr. Curtis L. DeBerg, a Hemingway scholar and retired university professor, visited the Mayo Clinic to research his book, Wrestling With Demons. He interviewed Sister Lauren Weinandt, a contemporary of Sister Immaculata who was then 99 years old.

"I asked Sister Lauren if there was anything else she remembered," DeBerg told the Post Bulletin. "She said, 'I think he inscribed a book.' She went into the archives and came back with this."

The Scholar and the Crash

For DeBerg, the discovery was personal. His interest in Hemingway began in 2016 after he survived a serious plane crash in Poland—an event that mirrored Hemingway’s own survival of two plane crashes in Africa in 1954.

"To carry Hemingway’s final written words to Stockholm is more than an academic moment," DeBerg said. "It is a personal one. This book survived decades of silence. Now it will live where it belongs."

DeBerg, who also penned the screenplay The Hemingway Code based on his research, served as the catalyst for the donation. He contacted the Nobel Prize Museum in September 2025, connecting the curators in Stockholm with the Sisters in Rochester.

A "Human Artifact"

The handover ceremony at Assisi Heights was attended by leadership from the Franciscan Sisters and the Mayo Clinic’s W. Bruce Fye Center for the History of Medicine.

Renee Ziemer, History and Heritage Program Manager, helped verify the provenance of the book. "It captures Hemingway at the end of his life—still hopeful, still writing, still reaching for one more story," Ziemer said.