I make my mom’s recipes every Thanksgiving. They remind me of what I lost, and what I still have.

Weeks after my mother found out she was dying, I cooked a Thanksgiving meal for her and six other people.

I was 30 and had just moved back to the Philadelphia area after living for five years in New York City, where cooking was not part of my vocabulary. Why splatter your walls with grease and fire up the oven — raising the temperature in your tiny apartment to 1,000 degrees — when there are innumerable cheap, delicious food options just steps away?

My mother, however, cooked for most of her life and had a roster of recipes, curated over the years through love and tradition. The food she made at Thanksgiving, in particular, exerted a gravitational pull on me, bringing me home every year.

There was nothing fancy about her holiday recipes, no special ingredients or kitchen tools required. Just the tastes of the season: fall fruits, potatoes and other root vegetables, and salty meats dripping with gravy.

Still, my need for these flavors this time of year always surprised me. When I went to college in Canada — where Thanksgiving happens in October — I didn’t get time off for the American holiday. I figured it would be no big deal to miss one meal, but when mid-November rolled around, I called my parents, feeling weepy, “Can I come home?” A few years later, when I decided to spend almost a year traveling and miss Thanksgiving, my mom cooked an entire turkey dinner before I left, long before the actual holiday. (Yeah, I know I had it good.)

But in September 2005, she was diagnosed with ALS, a terminal disease that had already left her without the use of an arm and leg. When Thanksgiving rolled around, I declared that I would make dinner, and invited another family who had always joined our celebration.

So the first thing I ever learned to cook was an entire Thanksgiving meal. For eight people.

This dinner wasn’t just about the food. It was my attempt to master her recipes in order to capture as much of her as I could so that when I couldn’t see her or talk to her anymore, I could at least eat her food. I could bring her back to life.

That Thanksgiving was also my way of trying to show her — and myself — that I was grown. That I would be OK without her. “Look, Mom,” I’d say, “I can cook.”

This dinner wasn’t just about the food.

One by one, she and I went through the notecards in her recipe box, me sweating over the stove with her propped up in a wheelchair next to me. As the smells of cinnamon, rosemary, and sage swirled around us, she added snippets of advice that weren’t on the card, which I noted in the margins. (Don’t overfill the pan of the pumpkin loaf. Use low-salt chicken broth. And always — always — brine the turkey.)

I prepared for weeks, stuffing the freezer with everything I could make in advance, and timing the final stages of shopping and chopping with military precision.

And it all came together. One person said it was the best turkey they’d ever had.

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Afterward, my mom told me she was proud of me. But I didn’t feel as proud of myself as I had hoped. I just felt sad.

I still have those recipe cards, still in her handwriting, with my scribbled margin notes. If there was a fire, they are one of the few things I would try to save.

I couldn’t use them in 2007, the year she died; Thanksgiving felt too painful, so I flew to Mexico instead with friends from other countries who didn’t care about the American holiday. That first year, I had to pretend Thanksgiving didn’t exist.

But I’ve taken my mom’s recipes out every year since and cooked them for a hodgepodge of people — friends, boyfriends, neighbors, and anyone in my life who doesn’t have somewhere to go.

I’ve made some tiny adjustments over time: I prefer her cranberry sauce with about half the sugar, I think oatmeal cookies on top of sweet potatoes are overkill, and I now buy gravy instead of dashing it out at the last minute when everyone just wants to sit down and eat.

And every year, I remember it isn’t just about the food. As the smells of cinnamon, rosemary, and sage swirl around my kitchen once again, those recipes remind me of how deeply I was once loved, how lucky I was for a while. But they also help me see all the love I still have in my life.

Because even though my mom is no longer in the kitchen with me, I am still loved, still lucky. And those recipes still exert a gravitational effect. I use it to draw people to me, to invite them to gather at my table and fill my home with love once again. “Come over,” I say. “I can cook.”