She was standing in the kitchen doorway in her pajamas, holding the lingering yartzeit candle with its liquid wax at a precarious angle.

"Hello there. Who are you? Look what I found! What's it for? Tzu hace. Tzu hace. Nisht gut. Nisht gut." (Yiddish: Too hot, not good.)

Emotions and thoughts collide within me as hot tears begin to blur my vision. The next yarzeit candle will be for her, for my mother.

"What's happening?" Our house guest enters behind me, a visiting lecturer from Kiev.

He takes in the scene and looks at me oddly; I feel a great need for a best friend at my side.

My mother says: "Shlufkeh." My paternal aunt's name. "That's right mom. One of the five candles is for dad's sister Sylvia."

My son Adam enters the scene rubbing sleep from his eyes. "Hi everyone. Eek, mom, why's grandma holding a lit candle?"

"It's for yizkor, a yartzeit candle."

"What's that mean? Isn't yizkor the service when all the kids get sent out to play?"

The son of a rabbi, graduate of day school and USY: How's it possible? Divorce, he grew up primarily living with his dad, a secular Zionist, and all his grandparents still are alive. But still..

"Mrs. Milgram, can I please see what you are holding for a minute?" Our guest Ivan takes the candle from her deftly, causing no offense. Ivan looks at me, "Perhaps you can explain to both of us."

We sit around the kitchen table and my mom mutters agitatedly at the circle of flames, "nisht gut, nisht gut." I rub her back; she loves that and is quickly distracted into in-the-moment happiness at the pleasurable contact.

"Yizkor means "one is to remember," like the Shabbos candles are shamor v'zakhor. It's the same root, shamor is to have a spiritual practice and follow it, zakhor is to connect with the spirit of the practice, to feel it. So when someone dear has died, we hold a place for them in our home on their yartzeit, that's Yiddish for one yar, year of, tzeit, time, since the anniverary of their soul moving to the next plane of being."

Ivan asks: "Why a candle?"

I explain: "In Judaism the flame is the symbol for the soul. The story of a soul lights up a pathway through time - of children, loves, dreams, adventures, challenges. Our bioethics halakhah warns us to be tender with a soul, lest we press it too greatly and stuff it out by our words or actions."

"Grandma is one of the most tenders souls that may ever have lived." Adam correctly describes his grandma who couldn't hate or hurt a soul, preferring to take the hurt for herself, while striving exceptionally to please.

Ivan is silently staring into the flame. When he finally speaks, it is close to what I imagined. "We didn't have the candles and the traditions, but we had the word, yartzeit. We would sit with my grandfather and remember my grandmother and the others."

"Will you remember me?" Asks my mother. Her usually random thoughts all too clear in the moment.