Grandma was one of the kindest, sweetest people I have ever met. I'll always have fond memories of playing Yahtzee and other games with her, helping her in the kitchen, eating her delicious meals, and listening to her stories. But, most of all, I'll miss her hugs. I wish we could have seen her one more time. I'll always love you, Grandma!! ---Leah

I always looked forward to visiting Grandma and Grandpa every year, I couldn't have asked for better grandparents. Grandma was such a kindhearted woman, always putting everyone else's needs before her own. She spoiled us every year with great food, fun games, and big hugs. Miss her like crazy right now, but look forward to seeing her again. ---Joe

My favorite memories growing up are visiting Grandma and Grandpa! When I heard the news of her passing, my heart dropped ...I can't express how much I will miss her, she was the most wonderful and kind person I've ever known. ---Sam

I will always remember home-cooked meals, playing card games, and watching sports. Thanks for all the memories, Grandma!! ---Dave

Leah, Joe, Sam, and Dave - November 19, 2020 at 07:36 PM

I will cherish your mom and dad’s shared stories and memories as their home extended beyond their own four walls, they uniquely embraced the whole town as ‘their home’ and they shared their lives with Integrity and neighborly love through and through.... so beautiful. May she rest in Heaven’s peace. ---Cindy

Cindy Meiner - November 14, 2020 at 12:03 AM

Mom always put Dad first, and though she made that very clear, we never felt slighted. Being second made us feel very loved ...because we know she put us before herself.

She loved Dad and us so very much, and lived for us ...though we know she loved God too, and that in no way detracted from the love she showed us, it enhanced it.

Mom did not put on a false front. She did everything she could for us, and even if that meant wearing hand-me-downs herself. My brother teased her about wearing stripes and plaid one winter. She said it didn't matter because she had a coat on, and no one would notice.

What most people did notice was how she valued everyone, and especially her husband and children.

Dad also expressed that he was sorry he hadn't been able to give us more things, that we didn't have as much as other families had while growing up. Yet, I told Dad & Mom that they both gave us something that many families don't have ...and I just left it at that, as they knew what I meant. A look of satisfaction told me that they knew that, and that they were glad that they had done something right. Grateful children are such a blessing to parents.

They did a lot right. And I miss Mom dearly. Yet, she had also done right by accepting God's love, and I know He has welcomed her.

We love you Dad & Mom. Dad and all of us miss you so very much, Mom.

Thanks for bringing me into this world, yet also helping me believe this is not the end all.

Love, One of six (Steve)

Stephen Meiner - November 10, 2020 at 03:41 AM

Wishing love and strength to the entire Meiner family as they grieve. Marge was so kind to a new kid in town (c. 1976) and her caring only deepened as I grew up and, eventually, moved away. She was so easy to be around and was always interested in hearing about my family and me. Even when slowed by advanced age and illness, she would do things like come out to the high school to see me finish the Norway Classic running race. A marvelous woman.

Taylor Polomis - November 05, 2020 at 09:17 PM

Grandma was one of the sweetest people I know I will ever meet. As kids she loved surprising us with cake, or a couple dollars secretly passed into our hands when we hugged her goodbye, and when we got older she began sharing her stories, like how she met Grandpa the one day in her life she 'bummed school.' She is the only grandma I was able to know longer than my childhood, and Grandma as a person was just as wonderful as she was as a Grandma. She was always so happy when she gained family members through marriage and through the birth of the next generations, and was always there to remind us not to gossip, because "you never know who might be on the back porch." It was nothing short of a blessing to get to spend nearly thirty years with her just a phone call away. I will miss her so very much.

Nicole Meiner - November 04, 2020 at 07:04 PM

My most fond moments growing up were in Norway with Grandma and Grandpa. I will cherish the memories of her dinner table stories and her love for Packers football. Grandma was kind, welcoming, and loving to everyone introduced into the family. She is truly an angel and touched the hearts of anyone who was lucky enough to know her. I will miss her incredibly.

Kristin - November 04, 2020 at 05:54 PM

Aunt Marge was also my Godmother I adored her and thought she was a lot like my mother (her older sister Marlea). I remember staying with her and Uncle Ralph at their farm in Faithorn and helping drive their cows to/from pasture...and drinking fresh milk for breakfast! She was a joy to be around.

Jeff Bray - November 04, 2020 at 02:35 PM

There are just so many wonderful memories of Aunt Marge. I always felt at home at the Meiner’s and always looked forward to visiting. I am broken hearted that she will not be there when I next visit Norway. Babs

Barbara Wolff - November 04, 2020 at 11:03 AM

So many people expressed their love ...this is only a small part of it, as I am writing this blog. But, I will leave it at this for now.

And Nikki added this wonderful heart of hers about Dad, which was much about Mom. My niece posted this on Facebook just days after Dad's passing (and I just came across it today). She shared what is in her heart, and bring tears from my heart:

My grandfather - my dad’s dad - was married to my grandmother - my dad’s mom.

That probably sounds both like a relatively easy assumption as well as redundant. But that’s also what I know he’d have wanted me to tell you first.

Others might describe him differently. He was a Packers fan - and to some, your football affiliation is the most important thing to know about someone. He was a World War II veteran, and I know a bunch of people’s ears just perked up, because World War II is the only part of history that interests them and they’re correct in saying there aren’t many left who fought in that war, so they will remember him as a veteran before anything else. Now that I’ve told you a little bit more about him, you probably want to either thank him for his service or tell me what you think of his football loyalty. And he’d have appreciated your thanks for his service, sure. And he sure could talk about the Packers.

But even before she died in 2020, Ralph Elton Meiner would have told you that the best thing about him was his wife and the best thing he ever did was marry Marjorie Ann Hoheisel in 1952.

People joke that Michael Phelps should be called “Miss California 2010’s husband” instead of Nicole Johnson being called “Michael Phelps’ wife.” We unironically call Simone Biles’ husband “Simone Biles’ husband” because we can’t remember his name. That man was on the Packers and my grandpa still called him Simone Biles’ husband. Likewise, my grandfather would have happily referred to himself as Marge Meiner’s husband. He was proud of that. He told me in 2019 that “if I had to live over again and could only do one thing the same, I’d find Marge and I’d marry her.” He didn’t like ‘ball and chain’ jokes. They didn’t make sense to him. “I don’t think you should get married if you don’t like the person.” He’s reminisced about my grandma countless times since she preceded him in death in 2020, but he was not a person that only knew what he had after it was gone. In the more than three decades I knew him, from when I was little and only knew him as ‘grandpa’ to when I got older and knew him as a person, one of the things that never changed was the way he heaped praise on his wife. When she died, he assumed that people wouldn’t visit anymore, because it had not crossed his mind that we were coming to see him. Of course, he thought, we were coming to see HER, because she was the best person who had ever lived.

But despite the fact that his marriage was what he was most proud of, he was also proud of his family for doing what was right for them. “I don’t think Nikki is going to get married,” he told a relative a few years ago. “I don’t think she wants to. Good for her.” He was somehow both nosy - I got all sorts of gossip from the man - and also managed to mind his own business. He was simultaneously proud of his military service while admitting that he was terrified the entire time he was in Saipan and never neglected to point out that the reason the government liked drafting teenagers is because they could take advantage of “those impressionable kids.” He told me of the ship sailing past Hawaii and not stopping “because they knew we were all scared and we’d run off into the jungle and not come back out.” “I don’t know if I ever killed anybody,” he told me, more than once. “There was so much shooting back and forth in that jungle. I don’t know if I ever killed anybody and I’m glad that I don’t know.” (There is an Amelia Earhart theory involving Saipan, and I told him a couple of times, “just say you saw her, just say you did, just lie, they can’t prove you wrong.” He laughed at that. I do want to point out that he never denied it, juuuust saying.)

When people commented on how lucky he was to have had a house full of boys (he and my grandma raised five sons) he would go out of his way to mention how happy he was to have also had a daughter, my Aunt Jean. When he first met my brother-in-law, he said to me “I like when my grandchildren let me meet their husbands before they’re their husbands.” Kristin and Joe were not even engaged at the time.

He flew planes for fun, telling a story of watching wolves run across the frozen Lake of the Clouds from above. He told the same ten stories over and over again but every time he told them they were just as funny as all the times before. He and I would stay behind when the rest of the family went to church, me pulling a chair up to his recliner and the two of us talking non-stop until suddenly, two hours had passed like nothing at all. He was an avid reader, and I’d give him books I thought would interest him when I was done reading them - a thing I also do for dad as well as for my friends. Next time I’d talk to him on the phone, he’d tell me what he thought of the books and the people in them, and told my parents more than once that I always knew what books he would like. He would never go, but he dreamed of the Grand Canyon, and of Alaska. Never seeing either of those places, he told me, were his only regrets. He read every word of the journals I wrote for him on my adventures, living vicariously through me as I lived through his stories as a little girl. I included as many details as I could in those journals, because I was writing them for him. Then, of course, there were the memories we shared together because we lived them together. In my 20s and early 30s, I would drive past the hills that surround the old house, unassuming fluctuations in the earth covered in trees, that are the site of sledding and hide-and-seek and Bigfoot tracking and games of kick-the-can and standing on the back porch spitting cherry pits at a hub cap mounted on the clothesline, so much joy both in childhood and as I grew into an adult. My love of the Northwoods traces directly back to him. The DNA that we share is the part of me that feels deliriously happy on the edge of a cold, clear lake or surrounded by peaks covered in snow.

He was born in 1926, while Calvin Coolidge was the president. He lived a longer life than people like Barbara Walters, Rosalyn Carter, Queen Elizabeth II. He got to spend nearly three quarters of a century (68 married, 73 together) with the woman he loved more than life itself, and watched all of his children grow up, those children coming into a changing, advancing world that allowed their parents to better protect them. He lost a sister, in 1940, to polio shortly after she had gotten married. None of his kids would have to worry about suffering the same fate. The heart attacks that killed every man in his family before 55 tried to take him nearly one dozen times but always failed, thanks to surgeries and medication and a pacemaker. He outlived his assumed life expectancy by forty-three years. He knew all of his grandchildren, and some of his great-grandchildren. He did not have to go into assisted living until just two months before he died - until the month he turned 98 years old, he was able to stay in the house he shared with my grandma since early on in their marriage. To call his passing ‘tragic’ would be wrong. May we all be so lucky to live so long, and to feel as fulfilled in our lives as he did. But of course, I will miss him, and with his passing I lose not only my grandfather, but the title of grandchild. He was the last of my grandparents to go. I know he will always be my granddad, and I will always be his granddaughter, but that’s not the same. I used to go walking with him, through the woods and down the dirt roads, and we’d come across someone I’d met maybe once, maybe one hundred times, and each time the pride in his voice was the same as he’d tell them something no one will ever say about me again: “this is my granddaughter!”

I loved being a granddaughter. I especially loved being his granddaughter.

Ralph Elton Meiner. Marge’s husband. My grampa. October 25th, 1926-December 15th, 2024

“There’s never a wish, better than this, when you’ve only got one hundred years to live.”