I’ll never get to eat anything that she made with her hands again. Before she fell off and never came back, she asked me to buy some sirloin steaks to grind up for hamburgers. I know now that she wanted to make hamburgers for my brother and me before she died – one last act of love – and she knew that she was going to die. She just never told us.

When I went to pick him up, he procrastinated for four hours and we got back very late, the groceries were stale and smelled funny. She was very upset, threw things at us, called us names, and told us to get out of her home. I did, because I was young, dumb, and spiteful. I left the key. We waited outside a while but she didn’t let us back in. I took him home.

The next morning, my sister found her naked in the kitchen staring out over the city skyline and Gravesend Bay through the window. The gas on the stove was on. She didn’t expect the home health aide that day. We think that she was trying to kill herself.

We prolonged her life for three more agonizing months, against her will.

While April and I were cleaning out her refrigerator in anticipation of her return from the last hospital stay to a hospice-at-home program, we found some crab cakes that she had made and never gotten to eat. We ate them because we didn’t want them to waste. They were the best crab cakes that we had ever had. We cried when we ate them, for her, and ourselves.

I’ll never know those flavors again, the taste of the love inside her food.

She was my mother, and the first God that I ever knew.