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Crossposted at HuffPost.com. Comments not included here.
GROWING UP IN Arkansas, we relished our Thanksgiving turkeys. Mother roasted them until the skin was crispy brown, and even the white meat was juicy. She admonished me and my brothers, Blair and Brent, not to pick at her beautiful birds while they were still being carved. But where was the fun in that?
I know Mother wanted us to understand proper etiquette and manners. I know her desire was to civilize us in the decorum of dinners and luncheons. But in her heart she must have loved it that her birds were good enough for us to want to pick, expert pickers that we were.
Brent, in fact, could turn a giant turkey carcass into a little mound of bones. My husband, Jim, and I used to say we should leave a good turkey carcass for Brent on his grave. He would appreciate that a lot more than flowers.
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TWO YEARS AGO in this space I wrote about my brother Brent, whose death at Thanksgiving 1990 in New York has forever colored this holiday for me. And so it is again this year. It's not a happy memory, certainly--but as the years have passed it's not totally unhappy, either. After all, it's a memory of Brent. He was my soulmate, and Thanksgiving was his favorite holiday.
I had been in New York for three weeks, from mid-October to early November of that year, and Brent had become increasingly ill: cancer, a by-product of his AIDS. Steroids were puffing him up, and he was experiencing considerable pain. His beautiful dark wavy hair was gone, and when he was able to leave his loft, he walked with a cane to steady himself.