In December my grandmother died after a long battle with Alzheimer's. I'm a fourth-generation Italian, and my grandmother was the epicenter of our world. At her funeral, I pondered how our family would fare without its matriarch; I began to fear that without her, we might lose the togetherness that is so central to an Italian family's lifeblood. I was overcome by an urgency to hold onto the lessons she and my grandfather, who is now slowly fading from dementia and Parkinson's, had passed on. I didn't want us to forget the stories of where we started, the stories that held us all together.

Being Italian makes you nostalgic for things you never knew. I grew up hearing stories about how my great-grandmother lived in the kitchen day and night cooking for her people; about her five sisters—one of whom raised them all, and one of whom tried to nose dive into an open grave to express her grief for when a family member died (we aren't known for our subtlety).