Dorajean Hansen

Dorajean "DJ" Hansen, 97, of Minneapolis, passed away peacefully in her sleep on July 2, 2026, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Born on November 29, 1928, in Chicago, Illinois, to Aleksander (Alex) L. and Elin Marie (Thorgrimsen) Pfutzenreuter, DJ lived a life of remarkable grace, empathy, and forgiveness. Grace in the nearly three additional decades she was given, empathy she carried into her work as a nurse and into the lives of refugees far from home, and forgiveness that, in time, drew her and her husband back to one another.

She is survived by her son, David (Beth) Hansen and their children, Elin Jane Hansen and Madeline Joy Hansen; her daughter, Elin Elizabeth Hansen; and several nieces and nephews.

She is preceded in death by her husband, Jack Hansen; her parents; her brother, James Pfutzenreuter; her sister, Laura Frank; and her precious niece, Kate Smith.

As she told it, Dorajean was just two and a half months old when the St. Valentine's Day Massacre erupted near her family's apartment on Clark Street in Chicago. After this her parents understandably packed up their infant daughter and moved the family back to St. Paul. They settled in St. Anthony Park, that small, close-knit, old-fashioned neighborhood on the city's western edge, where "DJ", as she came to be called, grew up.

Dorajean attended St. Paul Murray High School, graduating in the class of 1946. She pursued higher education at the University of Minnesota before training as a registered nurse at Northwestern Hospital School of Nursing in Minneapolis (known today as Abbott Northwestern Hospital). Earning her RN was a significant professional achievement for a woman of her generation, and nursing would remain central to her life's work.

DJ began her career with American Red Cross Blood Services, traveling across the Upper Midwest to organize and run community blood drives in the years just after the program's founding. She went on to work as a surgical nurse, alongside her mother, also a nurse, at Northern Pacific Hospital, one of a handful of hospitals built to serve the workers of the railway that stretched from St. Paul to Seattle. DJ later spent many years working in geriatric and memory care at Mount Olivet Home in Southwest Minneapolis.

Dorajean met Jack at a night of bridge hosted by his sister, Joy Benson, and they married in 1955. Through the years she raised her son and daughter with him on Van Buren Ave. in St. Paul and on W. 53rd St. in Minneapolis.

Later on, DJ could be found on extended visits to Bexley, Ohio, enjoying a porch swing with her granddaughters. She left Elin and Joy with memories of walks around the block, baking chocolate chip cookies, cooking up goulash and popovers, and taking bus rides downtown, just as she did on the old Como Avenue trolley.

DJ's hands were rarely idle. She was a maker in the deepest sense: a woman who could hook a rug from strips of wool she dyed and cut herself, count a cross stitch, embroider a hardanger kvitsaum, or turn an ordinary egg into something as intricate as a Ukrainian pysanky, all with the same quiet concentration.

Faith, for Dorajean, was never confined to Sunday mornings. It showed up in her hands as a nurse, in her table set for family, and in her home opened to refugees resettled through the Southwest Minneapolis Ecumenical Refugee Resettlement Committee, an organization she was a member of for many years. There was a thread running through all of it — nursing strangers back to health, raising her own children, and then welcoming families who had lost everything and were starting over in Minnesota — that wasn't always a straight line, and wasn't always something DJ herself would have called "faith" in a churchy sense.

It was closer to a kind of prairie inheritance: a Midwestern instinct that says you simply do right by the person in front of you, quietly and without much fuss, because that's what's asked of you.

A private family burial will be held at 9:30 am on Thursday, July 23, 2026, at Sunset Cemetery, 2250 St. Anthony Blvd NE, Minneapolis.

Memorial Service will be held at 12:00 pm on Thursday, July 23, 2026 at Lutheran Church of Christ the Redeemer, 5440 Penn Ave South, Minneapolis with a visitation beginning at 11:00 am.

In lieu of flowers, memorial gifts may be made to Operation Smile, Inc.