Nani Beraha mourns the fact that she will not have her mom’s candied yams this Thanksgiving. Her mother died from cancer in 2013. That first Thanksgiving without her, the family scattered for the holiday:

My dad ended up in Connecticut at the home of someone he’d never met, or met only once–my younger brother’s wife’s uncle. My dad was used to hosting holidays and when my mom died he became rather like a holiday orphan and shuffled where he could, his three married children divided by obligations to their married families. So after Thanksgiving last year he wrote us and said let’s all do it at my house again next year, together. And no one said much about it but it stayed the plan. My brothers, sisters-in-law, and even my younger brother’s in-laws said of course. And so did my mom’s parents. And her siblings and nieces and nephews. Everyone said yes, they’d like to have Thanksgiving together in my mother’s house. Without her. There will be 23 of us.

When my aunt and I were divvying up cooking responsibilities I volunteered to do the yams. I briefly considered taking them in an entirely different direction this year. I’m a peel-it-yourself, make-it-from-scratch kind of cook and I knew the yams my mom got came from a can and were then doctored by her diligent hands. But that idea quickly fizzled when I thought about what it would be like to eat Thanksgiving in my childhood home, with my family, with yams that were different on purpose. My aunt told me that she’d tried making my mom’s yams in the past using the exact same ingredients but could never get it right. Maybe because my mom never used recipes, and instead cooked by intuition, by taste. My younger brother confessed my mom had walked him through the steps one year but his yams fell terribly short of the real thing, too. I’m glad you’re going to make them this year, he told me.

More:

Tonight, as I stood there in my kitchen emptying the sweetened juice out of those cans I had a flash of what it would have been like if I had yelped “but I don’t know how to make your yams yet!” as my mom lay dying in front of me. It was a ridiculous image, but somehow also fitting. Because what I really needed to ask her was how do I do anything without you? How am I supposed to raise my children without you? How can it be that your important, shining life will be reduced to the stories I tell them about you? How am I supposed to understand the world without you in it to analyze it with me, for me? And how am I supposed to continue being a person in this world without you? Maybe she might have been able to answer me about the yams, but I just held her hand instead.

Read the whole thing. Those candied yams carry the memory of a beloved mother, a sign of what was lost when she passed, and a reminder of her continuing presence among those who loved her.

Do you have a Thanksgiving dish like that in your family? I don’t, but I love hearing about those who do.