I haven't tasted my mom's
candied yams in three years. And I'll never eat them again. When I was a kid
they were my favorite part of Thanksgiving. They were the epitome of her
cooking. Mushy and sweet. Uncomplicated and comforting. Perfect. And not, I must
add, covered in marshmallow (which my husband still claims is the
"real" way) or ruined by nuts or any other unnecessary embellishment.
Sometimes your mom just makes things right.
Two
years ago my mom threw a huge Thanksgiving dinner and her whole side of the
family flocked to my parent's big house in a DC suburb. I wasn't there. I was
with my in-laws (we trade Thanksgiving and Passover each year) eating yams that
weren't my mom's. Then, just more than six months after
Thanksgiving, my mom
died. By the time September rolled around I was five months pregnant with a
baby my mother would never meet and I decided Thanksgiving could go fuck itself
and my husband and 18 month old son and I went to Costa Rica to visit friends
instead. It wasn't for lack of gratitude, which was, after all, my mother's
deepest gift to her family and the most profound lesson my brothers and I
learned from her. I felt deeply, unquestioningly grateful for my many
blessings. For my incredible husband (who supported my aforementioned
suggestion about what Thanksgiving could do last year), my delicious son whose
existence was and is the light of my life, and for my healthy, uneventful pregnancy
and the promise of new life, despite my persistent grief and anger that my
mother was gone. On Thanksgiving we lit Hanukkah candles for it
was also the first night of Hanukkah, but there was no turkey or cranberry in
sight. We ate imitation Thai food I made with the lemongrass growing in my
friend's yard. We took walks and ate ice cream and plantains and drove to the
beach and swam in the Caribbean Ocean during a rainstorm and saw a sloth making
its way up a tree in a humid, beautiful jungle. So going to Costa Rica and
skipping Thanksgiving was better than the alternative, which was facing the
first holiday after my mom died in any way. 
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.
Maybe
it would have been easier if I'd ever even made candied yams with my mom
before, but I didn't even know where to start or which brand of cans she
bought. When I tried to picture the image of the can my mind drew a blank. At
the grocery store I wandered back and forth hoping something would spark a
memory but had no such luck so I did what I figured was the next best thing and
I Googled canned yams and bought six large cans of the first result Google came
up with. I've never been good at eyeing how much is the right amount of
something. This year I ended up with three large bags of leftover Halloween
candy. Last year I ran out. Six cans was my best bet.
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.

And
here's the thing. I don't know whether I'm hoping everyone will say oh, you did
it! You made her yams just right! Or whether what I really want, what will be
more comforting this second Thanksgiving without my beloved mother, is if everyone
tells me that I, too, fell short of making the real thing.