My kitchen is filled with the sights and smells of preparation for the Passover holidays. There is a list on my counter of the menu I plan to serve for Seder and a day by day checklist of what needs to be done each day from now until the holiday. Of course, I am well aware that I will have food for at least twice, if not three times, as many people as will be sitting around our table!

And while I am looking forward to sharing the holiday with friends (and friends who are family), I realize this year that what really resonates for me about the holiday are the memories that it triggers and the sense of continuity with the past.

I spent part of the morning taking china out of my credenza in the dining room and getting it ready for the holiday meal ahead. It’s my mother’s china, a set she had been given for my parent’s 25th wedding anniversary. She was already losing her battle with cancer when she received it and she never used it. We were living in Wisconsin, and my oldest was a baby. Jason and I flew home to Rochester every other weekend for months and I often thought his first memory would be one of the blur of people’s legs going by him, as I pushed him quickly in the umbrella stroller, racing to try and change planes in Chicago or Milwaukee.

Even though Mom and I never had a conversation in which either of us acknowledged that she was dying, every weekend I was there she would say “Please, take the china.” And I would say no. I would tell her that we lived in an apartment and there was no room. I would tell her that she would use it. In the end, the weekend after she died, I packed it all up and took it home with me, hoping that somehow she knew I had done the one thing she had asked of me. I understand now that she was trying to tell me the truth that she knew, that her time was coming to an end. I understand, as well, that I was holding tightly with both hands onto my denial.

Beyond her china on the table, her recipes will be a part of our Seder, as they are every time. There are recipes overflowing her wooden recipe box, most of them in her handwriting, many of them with no title so you just have to know what they are. I haven’t rewritten them, I haven’t converted them to a file on my computer. Instead, I treasure the yellowed pieces of paper, the little notes on the side, the fading handwriting that is as familiar to me as my own.

It gives me comfort to carry on these traditions and it fills me, as well, with longing and loss. I have spent far more of my life without her than with her. My oldest was 18 months old. when she died and the others not yet born so they have no memories of her, no sense of who she was, the calm, the love, the joy that were the heart of her presence.

We hold within us our histories, our stories, our loves and our losses, all of which are deeply and truly in our full hearts.