Kristi Johnson had never had a birthday without her mother making it special.

There was always food. There was always a cake. Holidays and birthdays were the kind of occasions her mother built around a full house, people coming through the door and something cooking in the kitchen.

Then cancer changed how much time they could count on.

Years later, when Johnson reached a milestone birthday without her mother, she walked back into the same family home. Much of it looked different. Some of it hadn’t changed at all.

Johnson, now 51, lost her mother after a three-year battle with cancer, as first reported by PEOPLE. Her family later faced another question: what should happen to the house where so many of those birthdays and holidays had taken place?

The Birthday Cake Neither Wanted to Call the Last

Before her mother died, there was one birthday Johnson still remembers in detail.

Her mother had baked for her again, continuing the same tradition she’d kept for years. This time, though, illness was already part of the room.

“She choked up with me sitting there,” Johnson told PEOPLE. Then her mother said through tears, “This will be the last cake I ever get to bake for you.”

Johnson refused to accept it.

She told her mother that she would get the miracle they were hoping for and make plenty more cakes. But her mother had been right.

It was the last one.

“My mom meant the world to me and my family,” Johnson said. “She had a bigger than life personality and loved to host in her home.”

For three years as her health declined, Johnson’s uncle Ron cared for his sister in that house. He continued living there after she died, until he was ready to leave. Before putting the property on the market, he gave the family a chance to buy it.

They didn’t need much convincing.

“We all talked and knew mom didn’t want her home to leave the family,” Johnson said.

They Kept More Than the House

Johnson’s older sister bought the property and began renovating it.

The goal wasn’t to freeze every room in time. She updated the house while keeping pieces of their mother throughout it: her artwork stayed on the walls, family pictures remained in the rooms and many of her belongings were left in place.

“My sister was the key to making that happen,” Johnson said. “She kept so many of her things inside the home to honor her.”

There was still the question of how to maintain the property long term. Johnson’s sister already owned several Airbnb rentals, so the family turned their mother’s home into one as well.

The idea fit the woman who had lived there.

“Mom loved to entertain. She loved people in her home. She never met a stranger,” Johnson said.

Guests could come and go, but the family could also return. The paintings, photographs and familiar objects would still be there when they did.

Then Johnson’s 50th birthday approached.

It would be her first milestone birthday without her mother. Her friends, some of whom had known her since seventh grade, made a plan without telling her.

They booked the house.

They became its first Airbnb guests.

Her Friends Knew Which Tradition Was Missing

The women filled the house with Johnson’s favorite childhood snacks from the 1980s and ’90s. They brought matching pajamas and birthday crowns, hired a chef to make food inspired by her mother’s cooking and invited other people to visit during the weekend.

One of those visitors was the hospice nurse who had cared for Johnson’s mother.

Walking back inside on her birthday was hard to take in.

“It was very surreal being in her home on my birthday,” Johnson said. She had never before marked the day without her mother cooking for her and baking her cake.

Her friends had one more part of the weekend planned.

They went into her mother’s kitchen and baked Johnson’s favorite cake.

It was the tradition her mother had believed would end with her.

Johnson stood in that same kitchen, now renovated but still familiar, and blew out her 50th-birthday candles. It was the room where she’d celebrated birthdays with her mother and where they’d once sat together facing the possibility that one cake would be their last.

“The kitchen is a little fancier now since my sister’s renovations,” Johnson said, “but the love and bones are the same.”

The circle wasn’t lost on her.

“She couldn’t bake it, but my friends could,” Johnson said, “and we’d eat it in her kitchen just as if she was there.”

The House Is Still Filling Up

Johnson’s birthday wasn’t the family’s last celebration there.

They have since gathered at the house for her father’s 80th birthday and for birthdays involving aunts, uncles and her grandfather. When the rental schedule allows, they return for holidays and other family milestones.

Strangers are creating their own memories there, too.

A high school friend once rented the home with his family. They cooked together and played Johnson’s mother’s piano, filling familiar rooms with a new family’s weekend. Johnson imagined how much her mother would have enjoyed being in the middle of it.

Guests now arrive at the house week after week. The paintings are still there. So are the photographs and the pieces of the woman who once made birthdays around her own kitchen table.

For Johnson, the front door still opens for people much as it did when her mother was alive.

“She’s still doing it,” Johnson said. “Just in a different way through Airbnb.”