They left us everything
Subtitle: a memoir
By: Plum Johnson
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2014
Place of publication: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Language: eng
Number of pages: 274
ISBN-13: 9780143189053
Subjects: Family; Caregivers; Biography; Adult children of aging parents; Family relationships; Aging parents; Care; Parent and adult child
Description: 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.