On a December afternoon eight years ago, I took my 9-year-old daughter to see “The Nutcracker” at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, near our home. She sat in my lap — I felt glad she still fit — and I told her how my mom had season tickets to American Ballet Theatre in New York; we’d once seen Baryshnikov from the first row.

“I wish she could come with us,” my daughter said.

After she said it, I felt this odd lifting inside me. All through the performance — as my daughter squealed at the mouse king, as she wove her fingers into mine while snow frosted the stage — I imagined my mom with us.

That lifting feeling was what I wanted on the 25th anniversary of my mother’s death: a sort of pilgrimage to her life.

For a long time, I had grappled with how to spend the anniversary. I had never observed it before — normally, I pretended it wasn’t happening — but a quarter-century seemed too momentous to do nothing. My mother had died when I was still in my teens, nine days after being diagnosed with cancer. The night after I learned she was dying, I lay in bed and felt as though someone had poured paint thinner inside me, dissolving my bones into nothingness. It surprised me sometimes how I still felt pummeled by that old grief, how it could sneak up on me like a horror-movie villain.

I longed for my daughter to know her grandmother Renée, though “grandmother” wasn’t a word we used; it didn’t quite fit for a person she’d never met. I’d given her my mom’s name as her middle name, but I think my mother was more a mystery to her than a real person. I also wanted her to understand how much this anniversary meant to me — even if at the time I barely understood it myself.

And so, I had decided that we would spend the whole day doing things my mom had loved.

I took my daughter out of school for the day. I wrote a note to her teachers explaining it as a “memorial celebration” (“25-year death day” didn’t have the same polite ring to it), and we rode the train to New York City, where my mom had grown up and where she had raised me.

On the train, we practiced our essential French phrases, since my mom was fluent: Où puis-je trouver chocolat? Where can I find chocolate? Our first stop was brunch at a cafe called Buvette — it wasn’t around when my mom was alive, but it was the kind of place she adored, with crumbling brick walls, battered antiques and scratchy 1940s music playing, as if on a phonograph.

I told my daughter how my mom could soothe the hard edges off a day with a plate of toast and French jam, its label in a handwritten script like a scrap from a love letter. She grew strawberries in our tiny Queens yard (the squirrels ate them all), and though the only bird I recognized was a pigeon, she memorized the rare wild ones alighting on our lone dogwood, which she’d grown from a cutting from my grandmother.

At Buvette, my daughter said her Nutella crepes were the best thing she’d ever eaten.

We walked down cobblestone Village streets and visited art galleries in SoHo, as I once did with my mom, who studied painting and drawing at the Art Students League. We rested with lemon tea at Ladurée; its mint-green space felt like sitting inside a macaron.

My daughter asked me, “Were you sad when your mommy died?”

She was too young for me to tell her the whole truth. How my mother’s melanoma had metastasized so quickly that no treatment could work. How I’d watched my mom’s belly balloon with tumors until she looked hugely pregnant. How watching her suffer was its own kind of grief, different from the grief over losing her.

Witnessing her death had wrenched part of my personality out of me — a belief in the goodness of the world, a sure-footedness that never completely returned. After she died, I felt a new kind of loneliness: aloneness compounded with this knowledge of deprivation, of feeling stranded without a guide. I wanted to protect my daughter from knowing that kind of pain. Yet of course I knew there was little I could protect her from.

“I’m still sad,” I told her. “I think sometimes I’m sad and happy and missing her and a hundred different feelings at once.”

On the train home, my daughter told me it was her favorite day of the year. She named it Renée Day.