Tell Me About Them

When someone we love dies, we become the vessels responsible for carrying their memory forward. The people we love stay alive in the big things, of course … but in the little things, too. When a listener shared an inside joke with the Terrible community about her late husband, we knew it was the beginning of an episode. Today, we share your stories, your inside jokes, your memories about your people.

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

There are certain things that are easy to remember about the dead:

That they’re dead. Although, sometimes, sometimes, your brain WILL let you forget, just for a moment or two, and you’ll think, “I should call my dad!”

How they died. Especially if you were there, and especially if it was gruesome or traumatic.

But there’s so much more to a person than how they died, and so when I know a person is grieving the death of a loved one, I always say, “Tell me about them.” Not about how they died – WHY DO YOU NEED TO KNOW, by the way? — but tell me about THEM. Tell me what made them special, what made them laugh, how they made YOU laugh. Tell me what you’ll know about them forever.

I’m Nora McInerny, and this is “Terrible, Thanks for Asking.”

My husband Aaron loved the pop star Robyn. He loved pop culture. You know how people used to type out, “I h8 this?” Like, “I hate this?” He would type, “I h9 it,” because that’s more than h8 … and it’s a really good joke that actually works more visually than anything else but still, it works. And when I really like a friend, I introduce them to this.

My dad used to jokingly — JOKINGLY! Jokingly! — threaten to give us a spanking, but he’d call it a “hot hinder,” and now my boys will rub their hands together menacingly like little cartoon villains, and say, “WHO WANTS A HOT HINDER?!”

When my dad washed my son Ralph’s face as a baby or a toddler, he’d cup water in his hand and vigorously splash it over his face — again, this works best visually. Today, that’s how my boys like their faces washed. They’ll lean over a sink and say, “GIMME THE GRUMPY WASH!” Grumpy was my Dad’s grandpa name.

These are the little things that keep a person alive. And they’ll keep going. And eventually, even when nobody who knew my dad is even ALIVE anymore, some little kid will say, “GIMME THE GRUMPY WASH!” And their parent will cup water over their palms and wash their face like a cartoon character.

So …

We have this thing called The Terrible Club. It’s a little Facebook group for listeners who have supported the show financially, and it’s also a nice little community.

And one day, one of our listeners posted what would become the idea for this show.
Lynn Smith: My husband, Andy, died in February of 2016. A vibrant, funny, smart, witty man was suddenly gone. Through the mechanical processes that occur when someone dies, it felt like he, his entire life, was being erased. So I purchased two bricks with his name. One is in the Portland, Oregon Pioneer Plaza, and one is in Carpinteria, California. But I don’t see either of them every day. In fact, I may never see either of them again. So I try to imprint him onto others. He was from Scotland and had so many unique phrases. I try to keep him from being erased by keeping some of those uniquely Andy phrases and words alive. One, from his mum, was “mousetrap cheese.” The term for cheddar. If you’re going to the market with your shopping list, it would include nice cheese by name — Manchego, Brie — or the list would say “mousetrap.” I love the term and hope my kids will continue to use it.
Sometimes, I just know an episode when I see it.
I immediately knew what Lynn meant: how we become vessels that carry the memory of the people we’ve lost … how the little things about them really are the big things.
And I asked Lynn if she’d talk to me and tell us more … about Andy, and about mousetrap cheese.
Lynn Smith: The first time I heard mousetrap cheese? I was probably visiting Scotland with my husband. It was before we were married. And met his mum, who lives in St. Andrews. Or, she lived in St. Andrews. She’s passed. And she, we were probably going to the cheesemonger, because in St. Andrews, they have such thing as a cheesemonger. And she asked us to pick up “some mousetrap,” and I don’t know what I thought at the time. I mean, the first time I went to Scotland, I really didn’t understand anybody. It wasn’t until I got used to the accent that I started to understand. So I probably asked Andy, “What, what is your mum talking about?” And, you know, it’s just such a great phrase that we used it. I don’t know that he ever used it before he heard his mum use it, but maybe because he loved his mom and I thought it was so unique and funny that he started using it more often.
Nora McInerny: What, what did she mean by mousetrap? When she told you to get “mousetrap,” what did she mean?
Lynn Smith: Cheddar, just cheddar cheese. Anything that you’d stick in a mousetrap, you wouldn’t stick your really good cheese in a mousetrap. You’d stick the cheddar.
Nora McInerny: That’s so funny, that’s so funny. So the first time that I heard the phrase “mousetrap cheese” was in the Terrible Club.
Lynn Smith: Yeah. I was just in a mood that day, I think, and thinking about Andy and just how I just don’t want his uniqueness to disappear, you know? So I’m from the States, my kids are all here, and they had never heard that term before. And so Sandy just used it all the time. And when I mentioned it to my kids, they said, “Oh yeah, mousetrap,” you know, so it really has become part of their lexicon now. I was just thinking about him and wrote about how I just really wanted him to continue in some way. And then people responded on that Facebook page about how they really liked it, and several people said they’re going to start using that term because it’s just so fun.
Nora McInerny: And I’m starting to use it too. I love it. I love it. This will be the beginning of this episode for us because you are the reason that we’re making this episode. You and Andy are the reason why we’re making this episode. So we asked a lot of people to send us their version of “mousetrap cheese,” so that we can all hear these little things that made our people, their people. And maybe we’ll pick up some new phrases. Maybe we’ll pick up some new habits. And these things that we love about our people are going to live on in strangers who will spread the word. So really, Lynn, I just want to thank you. I want to thank you for sharing “mousetrap cheese,” for sharing Andy, and for making it possible for everybody in this episode to do the same.
Lynn Smith: Thank you so much, Nora. I really appreciate that.
Mousetrap cheese. From here on out, cheddar cheese is mousetrap cheese. (And yes, I know there are gourmet, artisanal cheddars out there – I’ve enjoyed them, okay? I actually prefer an Irish cheddar, but that’s just me. I grew up next to cheese country, my husband’s family is from Wisconsin. If you are a cheese lover, just don’t come for me. That’s what I’m saying.)

If you live in a nation where you’re giving your mice something fancier, please let me know, and call whatever kind of cheese that is … “mousetrap cheese.”

Be right back.

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One of my favorite ways to truly unravel — to just tumble down into the endless pool of my own anxiety — is to let my brain wander into the future … to think about (and I’m so sorry to bring you down with me but HERE WE GO!) that someday, everyone who ever knew my dead dad will also be dead. That everyone who ever knew my ALIVE mom will be dead. That everyone who knows the people I love? We’ll all die! And we’ll be lost to the march of time.

Sometimes this happens when I’m just driving and thinking. Sometimes this happens at estate sales, or antique stores, or thrift stores, when I see the evidence of someone’s life just sitting there on a dusty shelf, when I see vintage photos of real people just sitting in a bin somewhere, and they’re like, five for a dollar. When I find a yearbook at a thrift store and I think, “Wait, nobody wanted Grandpa’s yearbook?” And then I buy it, because I want to be the person who remembers your grandpa?

Or maybe I do it, and I’ll ask my therapist about this, because it is somehow comforting to me to hold onto pieces of people, knowing that someday … we’ll all just be a memory. We’ll all just be ghosts haunting our once-treasured items.

And … we’ll be stories. Phrases. Little mannerisms and actions passed down and around, a way to be remembered even by people we have never met.
Tara: One of the things my husband used to always do is, you know, we had an elliptical machine in our workout room. And for the life of him, he could never remember the name of the elliptical machine. Like he could just never say “elliptical machine.” His thing was always the “reciprocal machine.” So every time I think of an elliptical machine, I think, “reciprocal machine.” It just, it makes me crack up every time.
Kylie Massengill: Three years ago, my dad passed away suddenly from a heart attack. And there’s tons of things that I still carry with me, because he passed away way too young. But one of the biggest things is that when we were growing up, he always had rock stations playing. It was always a rock station out of Tokpeka or a rock station out of Kansas City. And he would always ask me, “Who sings this? Who sings this?” And when I was younger, of course, I had no idea. I didn’t even know half the rock bands that were out there. So growing up, and just the more he asked me, the better I got at saying, “OK, well, this is Metallica, this is Aerosmith, this is Led Zeppelin.” And just getting better and better at figuring out singers’ voices or the types of songs that were played. And it got to the point where I could tell who sings it from the first couple of notes that are played. So the better I got, the more he would try to make it harder. That way, he could stump me and say, “OK, well, what record was this song on?” Or, “What album was this on?” And, “OK, well, what year was this made?” And, “OK, who’s the lead singer?” And he would just try to make it as hard as he could, and the better I got at it, the more frustrated he got that he couldn’t stump me anymore. So when he passed away, nobody was asking me anymore, “Who sings this?” I had all this useless information that I couldn’t pawn off to anybody. So I have started that same game with my husband. So any time we’re listening to a rock station and I’ll be like, “Oh, who sings this? Who sings this? Because I know who sings this,” and try to stump him. And he, at first he was like, “I really don’t care who sings this.” And so this kind of kind of a bummer there, but he’s starting to get into it and starting to really think about who sings it. And every time that he gets the answer right, it makes me so happy. So now I totally understand why Dad was doing all of this, because I mean, he wanted to kind of pass his knowledge on to somebody else because he had all this random music knowledge. And so he passed that on to me. And so that’s one of the things that I still carry to this day with me.
Stephanie: My best friend passed away about five years ago. We were best friends since seventh grade. She died when she was almost 39. So we were best friends for a long time. But she would watch football as a kid. She loved watching football games. But she didn’t understand what some of the fans were doing. And instead of seeing “defense,” in the stands, they would have the letters D-E and then they would have what looked like a picket fence. For some reason, as a kid, she thought it was a gate, and so she would chant “d gate!” instead of “defense!” And as soon as I learned that, that’s all I can see. Whenever I watch football or hear football, I don’t hear defense, I hear, “D-gate!”
Sheila: I explained a joke to my father once, because he didn’t think what I said was funny, and he normally was a good audience. So his reply after I explained it was, “If you have to explain it, it wasn’t funny.” And so we frequently say that amongst the family.
Rose: Hi, my name is Rose. I’m calling to let you know about something my dad who passed away used to say, and that we say all this time when we’re driving around. He firmly believed that only assholes drove Lexuses. And invariably, we’ll be driving somewhere, and there’ll be a terrible driver. And they’re driving a Lexus. And we all laugh out loud and say something like, “It figures! He’s driving a Lexus. He’s an asshole!”
Margaret: Hi, my name’s Margaret. My husband, Kirk, died five years ago, but he used to make fun of my speech because I grew up in Minnesota, left in my early 20s, but evidently carried the accent with me into my later years. I would be trying to explain something to him, and he would just laugh and laugh, and evidently a word I said made him respond, “Oooohhh, that’s soooo Minnesoooota.” I don’t talk like that, but that evidently is how he heard it.
Creed: Hi, I’m calling in regards to the post about silly ways to remember our people. It’s my brother’s birthday on Sunday. Every time I talk about him, I cry. It’s impossible not to. I miss him so much. But one of the silly ways that I like to remember him is listening to Creed songs, which sounds absurd, because I don’t really like that band very much. But he used to do the funniest Scott Stapp impersonation, and this is no criticism of Scott Stapp. I’m sure he’s a lovely person, but he’d just do this like really boisterous and silly version of him singing like, “With our arms wide opennnnn.” And I just, it’s the, one of the only times when I get to think about him and laugh and not cry right away. And yeah, so I just wanted to share that silly way that I remember him. His name was Brett. He would have been 35 this Sunday, and thank you for giving me a chance to tell you about this.
Beatrice: Hi, Nora, I’m just responding to the Facebook request for silly things that we carry on from those we love that we’ve lost. So here it is. I lost my dad last October, and I immediately thought of mouse turds. My dad essentially called mustard “mouse turds,” and I continue to use that phrase to this day. He also jokingly suggested he’d squish me like a pancake to get me out of bed when I was a kid, and I sometimes do this to my husband. Thanks for letting me share this. It’s pretty cathartic.
Kirsten: One thing that I would love for people to carry forward a loved one of mine that has passed on is the proper way to make an ice cream cone. My grandpa was a huge fan of ice cream. Loved to share it. And he always loved to be the first person to give a baby their first taste of ice cream. So the proper way to make an ice cream cone is to chill the entire cone with ice cream, and then you put your scoops on top, so you get ice cream all the way through. I don’t know why, but every one of us in the family, we just talk about, “Hey, you got to make an ice cream cone the way Grandpa does it.”
Ella: Hi, Nora, this is Ella. My friend Talia, who passed away suddenly a few years ago used to always say, “We deserve nice things.” It was like her rallying cry, and her justification for all kinds of silly things and serious things. So when someone wasn’t treating you well, she would remind you that you deserve nice things. And when you wanted to buy a nutcracker from a salesman on the beach at Coney Island or Brighton Beach, she would say, “We deserve nice things.” That is what I try to remember. And I had an illustrator friend of hers after she passed away made us a little illustration that says, “We deserve nice things.” And it’s above my bed, so I can remember it every day. Thank you.
TTFA Listener: Hi Nora, this is in response to your request for silly things that we never want to forget about our loved ones. My mom passed in March of 2020, but there’s just a couple of things I never want to forget, and one of them is she made us this meal one time, and she was always very thrifty with food, and she always froze stuff, and she’d make stuff out of it later. And we all sat down to the table and kind of looked at it, and it smelled sort of funny and it was a little bit green. We’re like, “Mom, what is this?” And she just looked at us all and like, you know, put this little smile on her face. And she said, “Well, it’s beef!” And we said, “That doesn’t really look like beef, and it doesn’t really taste like beef.” And it’s like, what is this? My dad went out into the kitchen and he looked and it said, “Thanksgiving Turkey,” and it was August. So it was definitely not beef. In any case, whenever we get together and we’re not sure what mystery meat we’re eating, we always go, “Oh! It’s beef.”
Erin: Hi Nora, this is Erin. There are two things that my brother used to do that I really try to hold on to. Both of them are irreverent and hilarious, and that was him. The first one is that my younger daughter was only 4 when he died. So, you know, during the last part of his life, she was very young. And when she was about 2, you know, about that age where they really start talking, he started coaching her that my name was Buttface. And so anytime he would be around, she would be, you know, pointing at me and laughing and calling me Buttface. Or he would be going, “Who’s that?” And she would say “Buttface,” and they would high five. And there are many videos of the two of them doing this. And, you know, our mothers hated it, my mom, my mom and my husband’s mom. But after he died, you know, we told them, “You’re stuck with Buttace. Sorry.” And the other thing he would do is if one of us left our phones unattended, he would talk one of our children into unlocking it so he could get on our Facebook and post things. And usually they were posts like, “I have explosive diarrhea,” or “I love the smell of my own farts,” or something like that. That was very much his sense of humor. To this day, I have things pop up in my memories that say, you know, “I love my own farts,” or whatever. So anyway, any time I see those now, I laugh.
Andrea: My grandparents came to the United States from Ukraine after World War II, and they had beautiful and rich accents. But the one thing they could never say was the V sound. So they would say “waccum” and “wodka.” And in our house, we “waccum” the house. We don’t vacuum here. We only ever wacuum.
We got some submissions in writing, too. This one is from Sara in Wichita, Kansas.

“My dad died last September, and he was the most funny and ornery person you ever met. He loved to answer the house landline and say, ‘Casa Taco!’ knowing that most people would hang up thinking they’d dialed the wrong number.”

I love that, and I miss landlines.

This one is from Beth in Birmingham, Alabama.

“I lost my only sister to colon cancer on March 13, 2019. She was 48 years old. We were super close, and even though we lived far apart, I tried to spend as much time with her as possible. I even quit my job to be available to her and her family. Our birthdays are both in January. About that time in 2019, we knew that Amy would not take any more treatments and that her time on earth was coming to an end. We talked and texted all the time. During one of our exchanges around our birthdays, I told her that instead of telling her I loved her, now I was just going to say that I sister her. Because to us, there really was no greater love or connection than what we had with each other. So while I don’t get to use it anymore, to me, ‘sistering’ someone is more than loving them.”

Oooooh. We’re going to take a quick break.

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Every time I rent a car, I rent the same kind of car. I also stay in the same hotel chain, book the same room, eat the same thing at the airport. I love — say this with me — a consistent experience.

And the car I choose is always — always, always, always — a Kia Optima.

And the reason why … is my friend Luke.

Luke Burbank: You’ll hear the ambulance in the background. I decided as a broadcast professional when I was moving to Portland to rent an apartment in what I call Ambulance Alley. It’s literally the one road every ambulance has to take. If there’s an emergency on the west side of Portland, the ambulances have to go on the street that my apartment is sitting on top of. There’s probably 70 a day. And I have a one-year lease. I’m so fucked.
Luke is a very handsome man. That is unrelated to this story, but it is a fact. And he is the host of “Too Beautiful To Live,” a daily podcast that he co-hosts with his friend, Andrew Walsh, who is also so handsome and also … so sweet. I love these guys.
Nora McInerny: All I want is all I want for my job is to just talk to you for a living. And I’m not joking. I was like, “I can’t wait till Andrew dies.”
I don’t actually want Andrew to die. I really don’t. But if he did, I do call dibs on his job. And it is in … this is not writing, but the next best thing.
So, back to the Optima.
Remember how we started this episode with Lynn telling us why she still calls cheddar cheese “mousetrap cheese”? Well, I choose the Kia Optima for a similar reason: because it’s Luke’s mousetrap cheese.
It’s a way for me to remember a man I never met.
Luke Burbank: So my friend Jason Newman, he had this Kia Optima that he is very proud of. I have the feeling that the salesperson had sort of up-sold him. Like, he went in there just, you know, looking to spend a certain amount of money on, like, a kind of middle-of-the-road Kia. [Nora: Yeah. Maybe a Soul.] Right. And he had been like he had been sold on the, on all of the bells and whistles of the Kia Optima. So he loved this car. He had actually taken it to one of those aftermarket stereo places and had, like, an extra, new sound system put in, which I didn’t know anyone did after high school. So he had like, a huge subwoofer. He would just, one summer, he was obsessed with the song, “Why You Gotta Be So Rude?” by Magic. And we were driving around this place called Lake Chelan in Washington State, participating in what we refer to as “Chelannigans.” And we would be sitting in Newman’s Optima, and he would just be bumping that song by Magic. And he had this kind of weird ability to get into something that we were not into, but that he was so deeply into it that he was like by the end of that summer, that was my favorite song. And he would do a hand motion along with saying, “Optimize.” And you and I, Nora, are looking at each other on video so I can show you. We would be sitting around. We’re like, OK, we’re going to go to the casino or whatever, some kind of, you know, debauchery. And we’d be trying to figure out whose car are we going to take, what are we going to do? And he would go, “Let’s optimize!” And then he would his hands up like he was going to give you five, but then he would pull his hand down into a fist. So we’d be like this … “Let’s optimize! And that’s the other move you have to do is to pull your hand out into a weird fist to symbolize or to signify that you are now optimizing whatever event you’re going to by way of taking his Kia Optima.
Nora McInerny: I will be doing it. I will add that in.
Luke Burbank: Yes, to confused looks at the Hertz Rent-A-Car counter. As you do, they’re like, “Um, Ms. McInerny, would you like to take the undercoating and would you like to upgrade to our special insurance?” And you say, “Yeah, let’s optimize,” and then you do the fist. And then, you know, Jason Newman will be, will be smiling down from somewhere with that. He was this kind of person who was kind of always the funniest person in the room, but not because he was like, working on his standup routine or like saying making jokes that were somehow like, you know, timely, based on the news or whatever. He just had these quirky behaviors. Speaking of the casino, when we would go to the casino and you’re playing like, blackjack, and you’re betting on the main bet, like, “Am I going to have a better hand than the dealer?” But then there are these side bets which are just terrible odds, like, you win a lot of money, if you hit them. But also that’s because you never hit them. He would call that, “putting a little candy on it.” So he had this other hand sign that was kind of almost like an OK, like, “We’re going to be OK.” He would then sweep his hand across the table and say, “Put a little candy on it,” which was him indicating he was now going to put one of these extra really bad bets down. So he was just full of stuff like that that we would say at the time, like when he was living. It just made us laugh to optimize and put candy on it and whatever. But now that he’s gone, it has sort of like extra significance. And the thing that’s kind of nice in our friend group is we all knew him really well, and so we are kind of keeping the flame going up like weird Jason Newman-isms. You know, if you’re a person who had like, say, a partner, like, the person who kicked this whole conversation off, I can kind of understand feeling a little bit of internalized stress about losing the language, right? You know, we have a bunch of people that are all kind of reminding each other of, like, the things that were funny about Jason or also the little things that he used to say to crack us up. I have this impulse. I don’t want to leave anything to chance. Right? Because the one time that I do, things go awry. I was in Los Angeles a week ago, and I was at LAX, and I was standing in the area where the rental car shuttle is supposed to come pick you up. And it’s very clearly marked, “rental car shuttles only,” right? So I’m waiting for Avis to take me to my Kia Optima. I’m standing there at the place that’s very clearly marked for shuttle busses only. And of course because it’s Los Angeles, this like very conventionally handsome man, kind of like maybe in his-late 20s is standin there. He has a man bun and his very conventionally attractive, I don’t know, girlfriend or wife pulls up in, like, a fancy like Mercedes Benz, and she pulls right into where the rental shuttles are supposed to be. And then he kind of like saunters over to her. And then they have a moment where they’re kissing in the car and like everything’s going well in these people’s lives. And at the same moment, the Avis rental shuttle pulls up. Now, my normal move in these situations is to like, grab my bags and run into traffic and go like, “I’m here. I’m here. I’m here.” Because I have no chill, because I’m worried that if I don’t run out and do that, the Avis bus will continue on. And most of the time it’s unnecessary. I’m just, like, being overly proactive. And in this particular case, wouldn’t you know it? I decide it’s Los Angeles. I’m trying to be like a cool guy and fit in here. I’m just going to assume that the Avis shuttle bus is going to wait for this attractive couple to finish their thing and then he’ll kind of pull in and we’ll be fine. No, Nora, we were not fine. [Nora laughs.] He just decided to keep driving because I had not run into the street flagging him down. It was one entire hour before another one of these shuttle busses came. I was tweeting at Avis. They have a thing on the app where you can look for where the shuttle busses are in your area. And the entire United States map was represented on this app with zero shuttle busses. I was tweeting. I was like, “Avis, customers, we exist.” I was sitting there imagining ways that I wanted to yell at this attractive couple about how they had stolen an hour of my life with this move. My night was whatever the opposite of “optimized” was. That was what the rest of my night was because I lost an entire hour of it waiting for the next shuttle. You know, life … it’s just like water. Can flow in one of two directions. Either you’re optimizing or you’re not optimizing. So, yeah, in honor of Jason Newman and honestly, just because it will make your life better, you got to optimize and you got to put a little candy on it, sometimes.
Every time I rent an Optima, I think of Jason. I think of Luke. And now I will absolutely add in the hand gesture to go with it. And … when appropriate … put a little candy on it.
This has been “Terrible, Thanks for Asking.” I’m Nora McInerny. Our team is Marcel Malekebu, Jordan Turgeon, Jeyca Maldonado-Medina, Megan Palmer. We are a production of APM Studios. Executives in charge are Lily Kim, Alex Shaffert, and Joanne Griffith. Our executive producer is Beth Pearlman. I close my eyes and draw these from memory, that is how powerful my brain is. I can remember nine whole names.
And I hope that’s the legacy that I have moving forward, that my children are like, “Well, your grandma could barely string together a sentence, but she had other good qualities, like: She collected things that belonged to dead people she never knew. And she cried a lot. And she wrote some sad things. And some funny things. But ya know, enough about Grandma. Let’s go to an estate sale.” That’s what I hope my legacy is.
Where were we? Theme music by Geoffrey Lamar Wilson. You can always call us, if you like. It’s great if you want to leave us a voicemail, comments, questions, complaints, concerns. 612-568-4441. Our email address is [email protected]. Borealis is not my legal last name. It is an internet name. It is a play on the aurora borealis. The number of people who don’t know that, well, it just makes you think. Is there any respect for the northern lights anymore? I don’t think so.
Thank you to everyone, by the way, who sent in their mousetrap cheeses. Truly. It’s wonderful. I love that about these episodes and making these things, is that we have such a good community of people who share these things with us and will share with each other. Pretty cool. Pretty cool.