Easter with Family and Getting the Lamb Right

My mother died on Halloween, 2008. We left vigil at the house around eleven to put our then two-year-old down for the night. Dad called around eleven fifteen. The next day confounded me.

Two of her brothers were in town, sensing rightly that time was running out. She had refused to see them, not out of spite or anything silly like that. There was no schism. They were her little brothers and she preferred they remember her as she was rather than as she was then. Stubborn and girlish was my thought.

We watched football. There wasn’t much else to do. Dad called her seven other siblings and disappeared into his study intermittently to write the obituary, though I suspect he’d had it more or less finished by then. The reticent trip where we scouted and booked a gravesite happened earlier in the week; was out of the way. Hospice women came to count pills.

Mom’s youngest brother used to throw a private party every Thanksgiving for eighty people at one of his restaurants. He always extended an invitation, but his place was up in Virginia, just south of D.C. Almost all of our people lived in the D.C. halo. My sister went a few times when she was in college in Annapolis, but we of the Alabama offshoot had our own thing at Mom and Dad’s. Besides, they offered heretical steak or salmon options; jarringly Protestant for such a gathering of Irish and Italians.

Mom was one of ten. I’m the oldest of twenty-two cousins on that side and then there are spouses, her cousins, their spouses and kids. Accounting for once or twice removed and seconds, eighty might be the under. I don’t remember discussing it, but the house felt different. It didn’t feel like a place for thanksgiving. We all made the trip north. My Mom’s side changed. Nothing was better or worse, closer or more distant. Our intermediary was gone. Mom kept me up to date about who was travelling where, sniping at whom, and graduating from where. Dinner was spent with suddenly active relations.

When we got back to Birmingham, my wife picked up Dad’s giant poodle from the boarding vet and dropped him at the house. Within twenty-four hours the dog was dead. I’d never heard of bloat, but it’s quick and thorough. All my life, the house had been busy. There were five of us, but we circulated. Ours was where people met before going out on the weekends. It was only a mile or so from the high school, so it wasn’t odd for a few friends of each to be about in the afternoons. One lady from next door and another from across the street were occasional cocktail hour friends with Mom. Even in the months long lead up through chemo and radiation, there were people stopping in with food or to visit. In a breath, all was quiet.

I sat with dad after the dog. I think my wife was there. “It’s just not fair,” he said, breaking a silence. I couldn’t decide if he spoke in defiance or with resignation, but it was Catholic.

We are a lamb family. I read that and it seems strange, but it’s true. Roast leg of lamb for non-Thanksgiving holidays is a given. That that isn’t the universal case shocked and shocks me. Occasionally when growing up, someone would tell me that they’d even never had it. Not exactly. “Ew,” or “What’s that taste like?” was how it came across. But there we were that next Christmas – my wife, son, father, brother, sister, and brother-in-law – not getting lamb right.

Mom was the second oldest of the ten I mentioned a second ago, and the oldest girl. As such, she was schooled in the ways of meal prep delegation. She certainly cooked, but everyone had a job. We were extensions, put to work even if the immediate task was nonsense meant to keep us from wandering off – sometimes she’d double us up on something trivial like cutting bread – holding us in place until she needed actual help. I suspect the most astonishing revelation to her upon gaining heavenly enlightenment was that only one person is required to make a salad.

We all did our regular jobs that year, but it didn’t turn out. Her place setting inescapably drew attention, empty at her end of the table, but with allowances for the obvious pall, something was off. Post prandial postmortems convinced us that inauthentic gravy and possibly a suspect meat thermometer derailed us. Lack of direction or synergy or something, too. Grousing about how dressing should taste or why the lamb was dry didn’t sit with my assumptions of how mom would want us to spend holidays with her gone. Sort of. She’d be torn between joy at indispensability and disappointment as she had to assume we paid better attention.

While we discussed all this, we sat around sipping stuff. There was Armagnac, Cognac, some apple brandy from California if I recall, and my brother in-law brought some aperitif that I he and I liked but scared the rest of the table. This was after Champagne before and Italian reds with the meal. Towards the end of our distilled pow-wow, Dad commissioned a series of practice holiday dinners. We were going to get this right before Easter.

My sister had a lead on the secret gravy ingredient. It was a pan sauce thickened with flour. Take the lamb out of the roasting pan and set it on the stovetop at low heat. There’s a good deal of fat in the pan. Pour in too much white wine, scrape up the good bits from the bottom of the pan to get them in the game, add thyme, salt, pepper, and then that other thing we couldn’t remember.

Mom named things. Not just us. She’d forget a proper name and invent one for the meantime which inevitably took hold and became the functional name. The missing lamb gravy ingredient was “mangia sauce,” though it wasn’t called “mangia sauce.” My sister remembered what the bottle looked like. Sort of. We figured it probably started with an “m.” She kept an eye out.

I can’t remember if we ever got the full compliment for a scrimmage. We had off-season lamb at the house at least once. Maybe everyone was there. We tweaked and worked things around.

What followed that Easter was one of my favorite family meals, notable absence accounted for – she would have loved it. We’ll never recreate hers, but this lamb tasted enough like Mom’s without being so close as to demand comparison. More than any night – more than her wake or that first Thanksgiving with the grand bounds of our gene pool – we sent her off. I did at least. As to the others, I don’t know. If anyone had said more than “She would have loved this,” and such, the spell would have fizzled, teetered off, and become a memorial instead of a smile.

Easters have gone off brilliantly and poorly since, but not because of lamb. This year we’re headed to my brother’s house. He’s making lamb stew and we’ve promised my twelve-year-old’s homemade donuts along with a couple of appetizers to be named later. His wife’s parents are coming in from Louisiana celebrate my niece’s first Easter. After five boys, she’s the first granddaughter on our side. You’ll never believe who she’s named after.