Arkansas Relationship Coach

My grandmother kept every birthday card anyone ever sent her.

Sixty years of them. Boxes and boxes, stacked in a closet nobody was allowed to touch. When she died, my mother and her siblings stood in that closet for an entire afternoon, holding cards from people none of them could identify, trying to decide what to keep and what to let go - and realizing, somewhere in the middle of it, that they were also trying to decide what to keep and let go of her.

Plum Johnson understands that closet completely. She stood in her own version of it for sixteen weeks.

After almost twenty years of caring for her elderly parents — first her senile father, then her cantankerous 93-year-old mother — Plum Johnson and her three brothers finally fall to their knees with conflicted feelings of grief and relief.

Then comes the house. Twenty-three rooms. Half a century of accumulated life. And Plum moves back in, alone, to sort through what remains of two people who filled every drawer and shelf and closet with the evidence of a marriage, a family, an entire world that now has to be reduced to what fits in a moving truck.

She thought this would be a logistical problem. Buy garbage bags, make decisions, get it done.

She had no idea.

1. Grief and relief are allowed to show up together.
Johnson did not feel the relief she expected when her mother finally died. Instead she found herself searching for evidence of her mother and father. Twenty years of caregiving, and still the house felt more inhabited than empty. That contradiction — missing someone and exhaling at the same time -- is something nobody prepares you for, and Johnson names it without apology. You are allowed to feel both. They are not in competition with each other.

2. The house knows things about your parents that you never did. Personal letters revealed that her parents' marriage had been riven from the start by separation and opposing temperaments -- and had ultimately been a hard-fought achievement both had consciously chosen. Plum reads her parents as near-strangers in those letters, then has to fold that new understanding back into the people she thought she already knew completely. Every drawer holds a small revision to the family story. Every box is a door into a version of your parents that existed before you did.

3. The parent who was hardest to love was probably the one who needed it most.
Johnson comes to understand that the demanding, difficult woman she knew as her mother was really someone who had wanted a closeness with her own daughter that she never received from her own mother. That reframe doesn't erase the hard years. It doesn't make them easy in hindsight. But it turns a flat, frustrating memory into a three-dimensional person -- someone shaped by wounds that had nothing to do with you, even when they landed entirely on you.

4. Siblings who show up for each other are building their own kind of inheritance.
For nearly 20 years, the four siblings held Sibling Suppers -- no spouses allowed —gathering two or three times a year to commiserate, strategize, and run their own version of group therapy around their aging parents. That ritual, sustained across decades and distances, is its own quiet miracle. Not something their parents left them. Something they built between themselves, in the act of caring for people who were difficult to care for.

Part of what our parents leave us are the memories of them, good and bad. Figuring out what to do with them is as close to a manual for grief as we get.

That's the whole book in one sentence.

I think about my grandmother's closet often now. All those birthday cards. All that evidence of a life fully lived, waiting for someone to finally, carefully, sort through what it meant.

They left us everything.

It just takes a while to understand what “everything” … actually was.

They Left Us Everything: A Memoir 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 have finally fallen to their knees with conflicted feelings of grief and relief. Now they mus...