They Left Us Everything: A Memoir

2014 • 288 pages

After the death of the author's senile father, and cantankerous ninety-three-year-old mother, she and her three younger brothers must empty and sell the beloved family home. Twenty-three rooms full of history, antiques, and oxygen tanks. The author remembers her loving but difficult parents who could not have been more different: the British father, a handsome, disciplined patriarch who nonetheless could not control his opinionated, extroverted Southern-belle wife who loved tennis and gin gimlets. The task consumes her, becoming more rewarding than she ever imagined. Items from childhood trigger memories of her eccentric family growing up in a small town on the shores of Lake Ontario in the 1950s and 60s. But unearthing new facts about her parents helps her reconcile those relationships with a more accepting perspective about who they were and what they valued.

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jan pacak

Established author writes memoir of death of her parents and subsequent dealing with what's left. What's left is not really material, though that is how the book begins. Plum Johnson and her brothers were fortunate to have a close relationship (though living in various places) and each took a caregiver role in the last 20 years of their parents' lives. Plum was the primary as she lived closer and had a lifestyle that allowed her to do so. The book intertwines the present (18 months of “cleaning out” mentally and literally), with the recent past (deaths of both parents), and distant past through letters and diaries (lives of her parents from meeting each other forward) and the future of their beloved house, it's contents and those left to carry on. Johnson did not live a charmed life in terms of the perfect family but as she emptied the house of it's contents, her memories brought to the forefront a more measured understanding of the role her parents played in her life. And how like them she was. And finally she was proud to be like them. Very introspective read.

October 26, 2016