My father died when I was 13 and what I recall clearly from that most gruesome of weeks about 10 lifetimes ago were the heaps of food that people brought over to our house, in particular a pork roast in a foil baking pan from the old Dreesen’s Market, brought over by I cannot remember who. I kept wandering into the kitchen and sneaking bites of it at odd hours and it was very savory. It is a bit strange to associate an especially tasty pork roast, 45 years ago, with an early and calamitous death in the family, but, anyway, I do.
My mother died last week at the age of 90, managing it on a Wednesday, deadline day, the day this weekly newspaper “goes to bed,” the day no editor in our family has rested since approximately 1925. We’ve been joking (if you will pardon us the offense of laughing in the face of death) that it was quite in character that Helen Rattray would wait to die until Wednesday. She was always contrary.
My mother’s demise at 90 was not a calamity; it was, as I keep repeating to everyone who offers their condolences, a mercy. She had been suffering from dementia for about six years, and it had been truly awful — no way to live — for two at least.
Friends brought food.
Have you tried the molten chocolate cookies from Round Swamp? We recommend! Friends of Teddy’s dropped some of these mammoth cookies off, each one as big as a Frisbee, along with a huge shopping bag of Round Swamp lasagna and chicken marsala. My cousin Ann brought a yellow bundt cake, my favorite, and on an occasion like this you don’t need further excuse for having bundt cake for breakfast. My friend Susan brought pasta with sausage and olives.
We’re having a potluck lunch on Sunday at Ashawagh Hall, following the 11 a.m. memorial gathering there. I keep proactively apologizing to everyone I invite to the memorial for having gone a bit rogue, family-dynamics-wise, and made a unilateral decision to go the potluck route; a potluck seems perhaps not exactly the right thing to do — aren’t we meant to be feeding everyone at a wake or memorial, instead of the other way around? But, honestly, I don’t care. I just like potlucks. A buffet table of random and interesting luncheon selections is something to look forward to at midday, after a less-than-jolly occasion.
It seems possible that the early hour — our freeform, possibly chaotic potluck lunch around noon, after we’re all done reading poems and making remarks about the role of the free press — may add confusion to the menu: Is this a late breakfast? Is noonish too early for casserole? Is brunch slightly inappropriate, funereally speaking? Well, never mind. The Rattray family has never been exactly conformist to begin with, and when you have lost a parent, people tend to forgive you for unusual decisions like bringing deviled eggs to the wake.
I think I will do deviled eggs two ways: one, horseradish, two, curry. Everyone likes deviled eggs. I’m also tempted to try an internet-viral recipe called “Funeral Potatoes” that has five stars and more than 4,000 reviews online. Funeral Potatoes involve hashbrowns and cornflakes; it’s very déclassé, but I’m not afraid of being déclassé, especially at a time like this. My mother, who had a far lower tolerance for either pop culture or kitsch, would disapprove strongly, but it seems like the right occasion to me.
I’m a casserole kind of person and I appreciate recipes involving cream-of-mushroom soup, and not in an ironic way. Potluck culture, don’t you know, is the surest sign of a healthy society. You bring the tamale pie, I’ll bring the broccoli and rice. Indeed, the thing I liked most about my time in Canada, when we lived down amongst the turkey vultures, lobster boats, and evergreens of rural southwest Nova Scotia — almost more than the bounty of magnificent, handknit, granny-made sweaters readily available secondhand at thrift stores — were the covered-dish suppers in community halls. The old-time, community connections and civic bindings-together had not yet been torn asunder in rural Nova Scotia, at least not 10 years ago. Around here these days? The corn puddings and baked ziti suppers are thin on the ground.
I’m trying to resist the urge, right here, to bore you all with remarks about the decline of American civilization in 2025 and the fact that the American pinnacle for potlucks — church picnics on the lawn and covered-dish extravaganzas in Legion Hall basements — came in the mid-20th century, precisely because those were the decades of maximum national greatness, precisely because those were the decades of maximum federal expenditure on things like bridges and roads, job creation, Head Start, and grants to institutions of higher education.
Is it the end of the world as we know it? I’m going with yes.
Perhaps it is also a mercy that my mother, a person fiercely devoted to social justice and land preservation, not to mention bookish (an intellectualism that is all but a crime in Trump’s America, where, I have just this morning read, the bungling billionaires have defunded not just Harvard University but the National History Day program for sixth through 12th grades), is not around to join those of us left standing in our nail-biting vigil to see if our grand experiment in democracy is really going down in autocratic flames and we’re all about to be frog-marched to the gulag. Or not. Let us be glad Helen is flying free among the angels, singing a soprano part in “In Paradisum” from Fauré’s “Requiem.”
If anyone would like to join us on Sunday at 11 a.m. at Ashawagh Hall to reminisce about the free press, print journalism, the heady days of American glory and bohemianism in the 1960s and 1970s, and/or my mother, please do come. You’re invited. Casserole optional.