They Left Us Everything: A Memoir

It's the moment every adult child dreads: losing a parent, and gaining a home jam-packed with decades of goods and memories. But in this warm, heartfelt memoir, one family comes to find that sorting the past is essential in order to preserve the future.

After almost twenty years of caring for elderly parents - first for their senile father, and then for their cantankerous ninety-three-year-old mother - author Plum Johnson and her three younger brothers fall to their middle-aged knees with conflicted feelings of grief and relief. When it comes time to empty and sell the beloved family home, twenty-three rooms bulging with history, antiques, and oxygen tanks, Johnson initially things, How tough will that be? I know how to buy garbage bags.

But the task turns out to be much harder and more rewarding than she ever imagined. Items from childhood trigger difficult memories of her eccentric family growing up 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.

They Left Us Everything is a funny, touching story about the importance of preserving family history to make sense of the past, and nurturing family bonds to safeguard the future.