Lengthy silent pauses. Cracks in their voices. And poignant spoken words, too. All give proof of the waves of sadness still stirring in the friends of Tom Grams.

“It’s a hard week, you know,” Sandy Bielenberg said.

It was a year ago Friday that Grams, a Durango dentist who traveled the world’s far reaches to care for patients in dire need, was randomly murdered along with nine others in Afghanistan. Although they’ve moved on, his friends haven’t forgotten.

“I’m always thinking about him,” Bielenberg said Thursday via cellphone from northern Minnesota, where she had just visited Grams’ gravesite.

As he had done countless times since 2002, Grams was on a trip last August to bring dental aid to a remote area. He had joined an International Assistance Mission team in Nuristan, a province north of Kabul. Team members were returning and had just made a difficult vehicle crossing of a rain-swollen river when they were ambushed by armed men and killed on the spot.

Whether these men were Taliban, as originally thought, or another group is not quite clear. (The Taliban originally took credit, claiming the medical team’s intent was to convert Muslims to Christianity, but local Taliban leaders later denied responsibility.)

“It’s one of those unknowable things,” said Ken Freudenberg, Grams’ longtime friend. “What we do know is it was violent and senseless.”

The week after Grams’ death brought international attention to Southwest Colorado, and his moving memorial service helped the region cope with the tragedy. It not only allowed people to process the event but provided insight into the depth of Grams’ commitment to doing good in a sometimes-cruel world.

“Tom was such a great example,” Freudenberg said. “Maybe we didn’t realize how good an example until after he was gone.”

Finding his niche

Grams grew up in Minnesota and moved to Durango in 1989 to join a dental practice and enjoy the area’s outdoor opportunities. He did both but found neither totally fulfilling. He found his niche after Sept. 11, when he was introduced to an Afghan man who had been tortured by Taliban captors. The man, Ateeq Ghani, who was living at the time in Albuquerque, had several broken or missing teeth. Grams performed pro bono reconstructive dental surgery in Durango.

Not long after that, Grams hooked up with Denver-based Global Dental Relief and traveled to Katmandu, Nepal, to work on kids at a boarding school.

Grams continued with Global Dental, traveling to 26 camps in eight years.

Laurie Mathews, the agency’s co-director, said in an email last week that “a camp does not go by without someone remembering Tom. ... He is still very much a part and legacy of what we do.”

She was typing her email from Guatemala – “at the site Tom helped me set up.”

Grams’ other long-lasting connection was with Kids 4 Afghan Kids, created by a Michigan schoolteacher and her elementary students, who raised money to build a school in a village southwest of Kabul. Grams became such a fixture that villagers asked if he was ready to buy a house there.

“Most of (the villagers) had never seen a toothbrush before Tom brought them with him and taught everyone how to use them,” teacher Khris Nedam was quoted in a 2007 column.

An armed guard accompanied Grams when he left the walled compound where he stayed. So he knew well the dangers of traveling to and around Afghanistan. When he joined the International Assistance Mission team last year, it was with eyes wide open. He hand-wrote a will the night before he left Durango, Freudenberg said. That was something he had never done.

The deaths left a huge emotional scar on the International Assistance Mission, which employs about 500 Afghans and 60 expatriates. The security situation has only worsened in most of Afghanistan in the last year, making travel even more problematic. But the consensus was that the team was just in the wrong spot at the wrong time, Dirk Frans, the mission’s director, wrote in an email Friday. “None of the expatriates left following the incident, and the work of IAM basically continued as before.”

The incident affected people around the world.

“Somewhat to our surprise,” Frans wrote, “we have seen an increase in the number of expatriates applying to work with IAM. That is most encouraging!”

Grams’ legacy

Mathews said Global Dental Relief is expanding, partly because people learned about the organization through Grams’ life and death.

“By far the biggest impact is the countless number of folks who have found us after they have heard Tom’s story and are inspired to reach out and help others,” she wrote.

It’s unusual to establish a successful business practice, then at age 47 retire to devote yourself to volunteer work around the world – in difficult and sometimes dangerous conditions. But that’s the path Grams chose. Some may not understand, but others are moved to emulate him.

“He was certainly an inspiration to me,” said Dylan Norton, whose brainchild is the flourishing Durango Doughworks on Main Avenue.

Norton, his wife, Katiulka, and three children have put the restaurant in his mother’s hands and left Durango. He is about to begin medical school at the University of Colorado in Denver. For a 40-year-old successful businessman, this is no whim.

Norton said he was jealous of the satisfaction Grams took from the charity dental work he did. While his doughnuts provide pleasure, he longed for a more fulfilling career. Thus, Norton begins a several-year process of becoming a doctor.

“I don’t think I would’ve done it without Tom’s influence,” he said last week. “Hopefully I can live up to some of his ideals.”

A great weight

The anniversary is weighing heavily on friends and family.

Tim Grams, an Air Force search-and-rescue helicopter pilot, was scheduled to meet with his brother in India after Tom’s Afghanistan mission. The two were to travel and to work at a clinic in Ledakh.

“It’s tough,” Grams said via phone from his home in Alaska. Earlier in the day, he had been loading photos of Tom onto his photography website.

“He was my twin brother and best friend for 51 years,” he wrote later in an email. “I’m extraordinarily lucky to have had such an incredible brother and to have had the opportunity to share his life and his friends in Durango and elsewhere. His tragic death has left a deep emptiness in many lives.”

Wrote Mathews, “It has been a hard year as we had to delete his name from all our trip leader documents – all the places where the briefing says, ‘Tom always does this part. You don’t have to worry about doing it.’”

Earlier this summer, Bielenberg and Kelly Rubin gathered a few rocks from one of Grams’ favorite high places, the notch on Snowdon Peak near Molas Pass. Bielenberg went with Grams’ parents last week to Grams’ grave site in Park Rapids, Minn.

“I left a little of the San Juans there,” she said.

People around the world were thinking about Tom Grams last week. He may not fit everyone’s definition of a hero, but he found a way to leave a huge imprint. And in this world, and particularly in this city, of thrill-seekers and the sometimes self-absorbed, he learned to turn the focus off himself.

Grams died Aug. 5, 2010, at age 51. The sadness is tempered somewhat by the knowledge that he found a niche that brought him joy and satisfaction.

“I know those last five or six years were incredibly fulfilling for him,” Norton said. “At least he really found his place at the end. I’m sure that’s something all of us would want to do.”

johnp@durangoherald.com

John Peel writes a weekly human-interest column.