She never wrote anything down. When I asked her to show me how she made her rice — the one dish that I have never been able to replicate, in twenty years of trying — she stood at the stove and added things without measuring them.
"How much of that?" I'd ask.
"Enough," she'd say.
"How long does it cook?"
"Until it's ready."
She wasn't being evasive. She genuinely didn't know how to translate what her hands understood into words. The knowledge lived somewhere below language. She'd been making that rice since she was twelve years old, watching her own mother, and the information had moved into her body before she had the vocabulary to describe it.
She died and took it with her. Not out of secrecy — she wanted me to have it. She just didn't know how to give it in the way I needed to receive it.
I am still trying. My version is good. It is not hers. I have made peace with the distance between those two things, mostly. Some losses are just losses, and you carry them.