This time last year, my mom understood this would be her last Thanksgiving given her stage 4 pancreatic cancer diagnosis six months earlier.  I accepted that she was a little crazy about distributing her possessions prior to having cancer.  But around November, she would show up at my house with bags of stuff– stuff she felt was important I have now and not after she died.  I didn’t argue with her or tell her she wasn’t going to die so stop being ridiculous; as my mother and my person, I recognized this was part of her process in dying.  She also dropped most items off when I was at work probably to avoid those kinds of conversations.  

She insisted on making spinach pie with Greta so that the tradition would continue after she was gone.  Further, she brought the broiler pan she always used when making it, first emphasizing to Greta that this was the perfect shaped pan, extra wide to meet the needs of the phyllo dough and not too deep like a casserole dish. She walked our 12 year old through all the steps, including what to be careful with when dealing in phyllo dough and making sure the frozen spinach had thawed, drained and almost dried; otherwise one risked a soggy spinach pie.  “Are we actually Greek, Gram?” she had asked about halfway through after reading that phyllo dough was Greek, and she knew feta was in many kinds of Mediterranean dishes.  My mom had explained that she got this recipe a hundred years ago from her Greek friend Kathy, and everyone in the family loved it, especially Pop Pop, my brother, and Uncle Karl, her sister’s husband.  When we were children, they spent a lot of Christmases with us, and, in the same breath, she told Greta, “We can make the spinach pie ahead of time and freeze until the holidays.”   

Growing up, my birthday was always around the Thanksgiving holiday, and she insisted on baking this German chocolate cake whose actual name was the “Better than Sex Cake.”  She saw absolutely nothing embarrassing about inviting my teenage friends over and serving them up Better than Sex cake after singing “Happy Birthday” to me and offering to send their mothers the recipe.  When one hadn’t had sex yet, this is a difficult cake to wrap one’s head around. My friends would just giggle, and as embarrassed as I was, it never occurred to me to ask her to make a different cake, as this one really was my favorite. She poked holes in the cake and drizzled caramel so it soaked in like a sponge. Then it was covered in whip cream. Delicious! Maybe when I was about Carver’s age, I asked her if we could just call it something different, and she looked at me as if to say, Why would we do that?  This is just the name of the cake.  And so it stood.  

Greta and Gram had a great day baking together; I sat across from them commenting on student work, trying to be in the moment while also taking advantage of time together, just the three of us in the kitchen.  Gram always baked with Greta when she was little, and then the busier we got, the less they baked.  But she seemed to understand the significance of this year, learning the ropes of the spinach pie. Then, when Gram headed home, Greta noticed that she had left the recipe posted to the refrigerator.  “But, Mom, she forgot the recipe, “ and I explained that in Gram’s way this was her leaving it for us to make in the years that would come.   “Does that mean that Gram knows she will die before next Thanksgiving?”  And as I watched her eyes and felt my own filling up with tears, all I could do was give her a hug.   We are never really certain when we will die so we appreciate the time we get as we experience the moments.

And so now begins the process of going through the random bags and boxes of tablecloths and scarves and notecards.  To my mom’s credit, though, she gave away a lot of her clothes to charity and other personal items she wanted her grandchildren to have and enjoy while she was still with us on earth.  Always a mom who put her children first, she did not want my brother and me to have more to contend with besides her actual death.  And so this Thanksgiving, very good friends and family will gather around our table, and we will laugh and collectively miss our mother.  My friend JJ’s mom, Nancy,  offered to bring the gravy, which is awesome because my mom always made that too, and Nancy seems pumped to bring hers.  Others are contributing food and drinks and conversation to keep my dad distracted from this first Thanksgiving without Polly.   I will attempt to make her stuffing from the memory of watching her over the years as she never wrote this one down.  While it won’t be as good as hers, it will be ours, and we will survive.  If only we could freeze time, and take a little out over the holidays, a splash of Polly at the table even just for 15 minutes. I’ve promised my children no “Better than Sex” cakes in their futures, at least if they are having friends over, although my mom would be laughing in heaven undoubtedly.