normie quormie

I don’t remember the last thing my grandfather said to me, but it was almost certainly, “I love you.”

That sounds rote, but it was always a big deal coming from my grandfather. A World War II vet (he was a frogman, one of the original Navy SEALs), he was wildly uncomfortable with displays of emotion. For most of my childhood and adolescence, I would tell him that I loved him and he would grumble something under his breath before handing the phone back to my grandmother. When I was 17 and very sure that I knew the world (in that way that only a 17-year-old can be), I sent him a letter saying that I understood that he was uncomfortable with it but that I didn’t care; I loved him and I was going to keep telling him that I loved him because I knew we wouldn’t have unlimited chances to say it. He wrote me back — I can’t remember exactly what it said and I lost the card somewhere between high school and college, but the gist of it was, “OK, kid.” And from then on, whenever I told Norman Henry Queram that I loved him, he always said it back.

He died on Sunday, May 5 after a long, slow decline that was completely unbefitting his stature, his proud nature, his snappy dressing and his staunch principles. There was no cause of death. He was 95, he had survived the war and a late bout with colon cancer, he had lived a long, full life, and in many ways the end was a sweet release, for him and for those of us who loved him.

You would think that would make it easier but somehow it doesn’t. We were lucky to have had so many years with him, yes, and while death is never easy this is the best kind of death, yes, and I had been preparing myself for this for years, yes — but it still wasn’t easy. My dad called to tell me on a Sunday morning while I was sorting my children’s laundry and when we hung up I sat alone on my bed soaking in the news. I didn’t cry. I called my aunt to ask if it was OK that I felt sad but not emotional. I called my dad back and asked what I could do to help, here in Maryland so far from home and feeling odd and blank and adrift.

He asked if I could write Norman’s obituary, a task I fell on gratefully, immediately, like a starving person offered a meal, because it was a tangible thing that I could do after so many months of not being able to do anything. Obituaries are strange beasts, though. They contain the notable facts of a person’s life, but not really any of the things that actually make a person notable. Yes, my grandfather fought in World War II, something he (and I, and all of us) took great pride in. Yes, he was the fifth of six children, one of four boys who went to war and came home, all raised by a single mother after the sudden and untimely death of my great-grandfather. These things matter but they aren’t the whole story. They aren’t even close.

Because I was in charge of telling that sliver of Norman’s life I included some of the things that I thought were equally important (he golfed religiously, he gardened, he cooked, he puttered, he brooded, he loved cocktail hour, he loved my grandmother), but there was not in the end enough room for all of the things I deemed crucial and not enough space for the story of my relationship with him. That’s OK because the obituary is not, of course, about me. Those details are not for the paper or the public.

They are for me.

They are for here.

Normie was the only grandfather I ever knew — my other grandfather, my mother’s dad, died before I was born — and he was a towering presence in my life, always. He and my grandmother lived in a cozy duplex in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, and when I was little and stayed overnight there he would hide under the workbench at the bottom of the basement stairs and come roaring up, fingers bent into claws like a monster while I ran through the living room, giggling and shrieking and breathless with anticipation for him to do it again. He built a deck off their back door and tended a vegetable garden in the yard, bringing in bulging tomatoes and handfuls of green beans for my grandma to turn into dinner. At Thanksgiving, he was always in charge of the mashed potatoes because he made the very best kind — creamy, thick, loaded with butter and cream — and when I would come to visit he always made a pot of them for me, regardless of the time of year, because he knew they were my favorite.

He invented a dish we refer to as “potatoes on the grill,” consisting of chopped white potatoes, chunks of butter, slices of American cheese, mushrooms, green pepper and onion, wrapped in tinfoil and cooked over charcoal until everything melts and softens together. He ate his apple pie with melted cheese and kept a glass jar of hard candy by the sink in the kitchen. He hung a tennis ball from a long string attached to the roof of the garage to mark where the car should stop to leave enough room for his work bench at the front, where he’d putter, framing my grandmother’s cross-stitch projects and fixing things.

He had his own space in the basement, with a scratchy yellow armchair, his autographed poster of Arnold Palmer, a side table filled with old magazines and notes written on scrap paper, and a big, heavy table with a turn-dial TV and a BETA VCR that he used mostly to watch old John Wayne movies. He wore cashmere sweaters, most of them monogrammed, and smelled like Old Spice aftershave and cedar.

His hearing went bad years before he grudgingly consented to hearing aids. When he finally got them he would press my cheek against his when we hugged so that his hearing aids would squeal, making both of us giggle. He liked vodka martinis (the cheaper the vodka the better) and salted cocktail peanuts, and when he got up to grab another handful before dinner he would make a very specific hand gesture — sort of a clenching and unclenching of his fist, fingers splayed like the legs of a starfish, sometimes accompanied by a clicking of the tongue.

He loved Labrador retrievers. His first was a black dog named Sam and his second was a chocolate Lab named Mousse, a hulking 140-pound beast who thought he was a lap dog and loved to give high fives. (Mousse died very suddenly at a very young age and I think it broke my grandpa a little, because after that they only ever had cats.) He fretted about everything —about my car, about my driving back and forth between Wisconsin and Michigan, about how busy we all were — which prompted my grandmother to refer to him, affectionately, as Captain Gloomy.

But he was also kind and the sweetest man alive. He was always there for me and always proud of me, whether I was graduating with a master’s degree or slinking home with a broken heart and my tail between my legs. He did not dispense advice but he offered steadfast support. He was there. He was always there.

I have had a lot of kinds of love in my life, a lot of examples of how and how not to live. My grandfather was the very best version of all of them.

I missed him long before he was gone, when he started to slip away, when his hearing got so bad we could no longer talk on the phone, when things began to get a little fuzzy for him and talking would have been difficult even if he could hear me perfectly. But even that missing didn’t prepare me to live in a world where he no longer exists. It still feels strange now, more than two months later; like an ill-fitting sweater I’m trying to settle into even though it doesn’t look or feel right at all. I much prefer the other side, where riding the train to work and walking to my office weren’t simply more opportunities to think about him and try not to cry, where the absence of him in the world didn’t punch me in the stomach randomly, where even if he couldn’t hear or understand me perfectly there was still the option to call him up and shout into the phone, “IT’S KATE, HOW ARE YOU?” and wait for him to say, “KATE? I’M GOOD. I LOVE YOU. TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF.”

I will, Normie.

I love you too.