They Left Us Everything: A Memoir

This house is so big I realize I'll need a master plan for clearing it out. I can't afford to get emotional. There are twenty-three rooms, so if I get caught up in the rigging, I'll go down with the ship.

They Left Us Everything – the first book ever written by the 68-year-old Plum Johnson – recently won the RBC Taylor Prize for Non-fiction for 2015, and when I heard of it, I was intrigued to discover what an award-winning-late-in-life-first-time-author would sound like, and I was delighted by what Johnson accomplished here. This is an insightful memoir populated with larger-than-life characters and a sprawling century home on the shores of Lake Ontario, written in a literary and engaging style. 

Plum Johnson suffered the pinnacle of her sandwich generation: as a single Mom and entrepreneur, she also spent nearly twenty years as the go-to child of a father who was deteriorating from Alzheimer's and a needy and demanding mother. When her 93-year-old mother finally died, Johnson was overcome with equal measures of grief and relief, and when it was determined that she was best situated to be the one of her siblings to clear out the family home before selling it, Johnson was forced to re-examine her parents and their relationship through the things they left behind. While this is a common enough situation to be in, there was nothing common about Johnson's family: her father was a strict former British Naval Officer who had a chaotic childhood and her mother was a pampered Southern Belle; gregarious, artistic, and full of life. Together, Johnson's parents fought constantly, but provided a stable and happy childhood for their five children. And the family home was uncommon, too: a huge house on the lakeshore in Oakville, ON – now valued at $2.5 million and therefore too expensive for the children to keep – every room was stuffed with the flotsam of fifty years of family life. And this flotsam itself was uncommon: not all of us will discover amongst our parents' papers a letter of pardon from the Napoleonic Wars or have an entire bookshelf of volumes written by or about family members. What was intended to be a six week clearing out process eventually took Johnson nearly a year and a half, and in the end, that was how long it would take her to process what she was discovering about her family and about herself.

I've been struggling to understand not only my relationship to Mum, but what this ancestral home means to me. I sense that it, too, is womb-like, this container – the source of all my happiness and unhappiness, the two inextricably intertwined, to be understood if at all by the untangling of it.

And so, in the end, what Johnson discovers is that the major decluttering she needs to work on is that in her own mind surrounding her relationship with her mother. And while, again, mother-daughter relationships are common enough material, Johnson is able to weave a story that feels completely fresh yet completely familiar; everything about her Mum is extreme, so it follows that their relationship would have been, too.

Am I my mother's biographer? Do all daughters become their mother's biographers, taking her history and passing it on to future generations? Writing letters was one of Mum's greatest talents, and here is the record of her life. At the end of our lives, we become only memories. If we're lucky, someone is passing those down.

We should all be so lucky to have someone like Plum Johnson passing down the stories our lives create.

When Plum Johnson and her brothers arrived at the point where they were to divide their parents' assets, they used an “auction” process: after having everything of value appraised and the priceless personal artefacts separated into lots, the siblings took turns “buying” items with their share of the total value. It all seems very civilised, and after a bit of horse trading after the fact, it sounds like everyone ended up with the items that were most meaningful to them. I sincerely hope that my brothers and I won't be blinded by greed when the time comes to divide our parents' assets – and we have all said that we can't imagine ourselves fighting over stuff – but we certainly haven't been shown the right way to do things (although I am grateful that I sprung from one of the few reasonable branches of my family tree).

When my Dad's parents passed away, as their favourite child, they left everything to him alone; their house and all its contents. Dad knew that that wasn't fair, and as he needed the money less than his siblings, he came up with a peacekeeping solution: he divided the value into quarters and gave his sister and two brothers an equal share, divided his share among me and my brothers, and made his siblings sign a form saying that if they ever badmouthed his behaviour regarding the inheritance, they would have to pay it back to him (that is so Dad, but they live in a tiny community, so badmouthing matters).

Dad's sister Shirley had been living in the family home after their parents were relocated to nursing homes (Grampie to a home for veterans in Halifax, and later, Grammie to a closer facility), and Shirley continued to live there for a few months with her husband after Grammie died and before the house was sold. Between Grampie and Grammie's deaths, Dad was upset when he realised that a gun Grampie had especially wanted him to have (an engraved rifle that had been presented to Grampie by the Parks Department for 30 years of outstanding service) was missing from the house, and when that filtered back to my grandmother, she was so upset, assuming one of her sons had taken it, that she offered a reward to anyone who might find it; but no one ever came forward with it. When my Uncle Alvin died several years later, one of his sons came to my Dad with a rusty, crud-covered rifle that he had found buried in his Dad's shed, and although of course my Dad recognised it, he shrugged and didn't malign his dead brother – the only thing he actually wanted had been destroyed and complaining wouldn't bring it back. (But Grampie did have a kind of revenge against Alvin – when he and my Dad went up in a Cessna to dump Grampie's ashes over the Medway River, Alvin opened the box, tipped it towards the open window, and had the ashes blow back into his face, clogging up his nose and mouth and eyes.)

In the months after Grammie's death, Dad would drive past the family home to go to the store in the village and he realised that the grass at the house wasn't being cut. When he went to ask his sister about it, she said it was because they had sold the riding mower. The entire time Grammie was in the nursing home, my Aunt Shirley was billing the utilities for the house to her mother's bank account, and after she died, Shirley continued to expect someone else (my Dad) to keep paying those bills. Keeping peace, Dad did pay the bills, but eventually he realised that Shirley and her husband had stripped the house of all of its valuable contents (all of which, remember, were left to him alone, and gone were everything including expensive guns, fishing reels of sentimental value, and household items that my parents had bought). And even all of this he could forgive and forget, but after Grammie and Grampie were both gone and the house was sold, the government came after Shirley (as her parents' Power of Attorney during their later years) and wanted an explanation of money missing from their bank accounts (since the NS government provides free eldercare based on their assets; what's in their bank accounts matters). Panicking, Shirley came to Dad and wanted any receipts he had for things he had bought for Grammie out of his own pocket (like a very expensive wheelchair for obese people that the nursing home couldn't provide for her), and when he refused to participate in defrauding the government, Shirley blackballed him from her life (and I don't think they've spoken since, even though they continue to live in a community of a couple hundred people). I think there was probably some resentment from his brothers as well, but they knew better than to mess with Dad; and all this despite his best efforts to prevent problems.

But as badly as my Dad's family behaved, my Mum's was worse. Background on a key player, my Aunt Carole: My mother came from a home with five kids, three girls (with Carole being the baby for a few years) and then after a pause, two boys who pretty much sucked up all the parental love. My Mum and her older sister Judi got married in the same year, and even though she was only 17 or something, Carole also decided to move out, renting a funky attic apartment where she could do her “art”. She was a pretty bad oil painter, but we loved visiting Carole – she was young and carefree, rode a motorcycle, and had a stack of nudie magazines about which she just shrugged when we found them (“They're for body studies, study the bodies all you like”). This was the early 70s and she was a full-blown hippy, likely a heavy pot smoker like her younger brothers would eventually be, and we thought she was the coolest relative we had. I was her flower girl when she married my Uncle Eric – a soft-spoken,impressively-mustachioed hippy himself – but after we moved away to Ontario, we rarely saw them again. When Kyler was maybe 19, he and his girlfriend went down to PEI with our Mum, and as her godson, he decided to pop in on Carole at the gift shop she worked at. He was excited to introduce Carole to Christine, but when she saw him coming towards her, Carole gave a bland, “Hi, how ya doin? Ya, OK, I guess I better get back to work”. Kyler expected a hug or at least a “Oh my God, look how big you've grown”, but this aunt, who had been our favourite relative, couldn't care less about him or his future wife.

When my Pop died, the first thing Carole did was to take his wedding ring to give to her son, William, explaining that, “He was always Dad's favourite and he would have wanted it this way”. Despite never making that intention clear, it was more galling to my mother that, if any grandson was to get their father's ring, it should have been my brother Ken, as the oldest. (And privately, Mum told me that William definitely wasn't Pop's favourite anything.) A few years later, after we all gathered in PEI for my cousin Kaitlin's wedding, within a month, Carole announced that she and Eric (Kaitlin's parents) were divorcing, and having no money, she was moving in with my grandmother, Mom. Now, Mom had always said that when she could no longer take care of the house, she had a nursing home picked out that she wanted to go to. But, with Carole needing a home, Mom was trapped: the older she got, the unhappier she was in the house, and when Carole would go away for a weekend, Mom needed to take care of herself and Carole's near feral-cats (Mom told me once that she would just throw some dry food over the banister into the basement and hoped they got it; she couldn't climb down the stairs and she was afraid of the cats). This whole time, Carole presented her situation as “taking care of Mom”. It became clearer and clearer that Mom wanted to go to the nursing home, but that couldn't happen until they sold the house, and no one wanted to put Carole (pushing 60 with no savings and no retirement plan) onto the street. My Uncle Mike – the baby out in Calgary – called my Mum and said, “You and I could always buy the house as a vacation property for ourselves and Mom would have the money to move”. This was such a logical solution – my Pop had built that house with his own hands and no one wanted to see it sold – that Mum called the other siblings to propose it, seeing no reason for anyone to object. But she didn't figure on Carole, who called up Mum, and with breath seething between her teeth, informed Mum, “My mother's. Fucking. House. Is not. For. Sale.” And then she hung up on Mum and wouldn't talk to her for months.

Of course, when Mom died – having never made the move to the nursing home as she had always wanted – things were...interesting. The first thing Carole did was to go to Mom's bank and inspect her safety deposit box, alone, and reported back to the family that it was empty; not even a will (which my mother found curious and prompted my father to be vocal about the likely shenanigans Carole was up to). The siblings decided that Carole should continue to live in the family home (with all of the bills continuing to be paid by the estate, just like my Aunt Shirley had expected) and they were willing to have Carole buy them out, proposing an arbitrarily low value for the house. When my Uncle Dennis (Judi's husband) said that the house should be appraised for its fair value as a matter of legality, and since my Dad pushed for this, when Mum said she agreed with Dennis, Carole went ballistic on her, saying that she was always jealous of Carole's special relationship with their mother and accused Mum of trying to wrest control of the house away from her, etc. In the end, the house was appraised, and Carole was forced to get a mortgage to buy out her siblings. My mother was inclined to just give up her share but it was my Dad who told her it was more important to honour her parents' wishes than appease a grasping sibling – which was why, although he dispersed his share of his parents' assets to us kids, he did take his share. As for the non-house assets, Mum got very little: photo albums from the trips she took her parents on; she was begrudgingly given a chipped coral ring that had special meaning to her alone; and I think she got her grandmother's rocking chair. My Pop was a fiddle player and he had two very good instruments that he intended to leave to anyone who had learned to play them, and as soon as Mom died, both Carole and Judi took one of them (Carole saying that her William – Pop's apparent favourite – was always supposed to get one and Judi saying that she obviously couldn't learn to play until she had a fiddle of her own). I know my Mum's feelings were deeply hurt over the behaviour of her siblings, and there were so many more stories than this that she was reporting to me as the saga dragged out, and I know that there are two sides to every story, but it seems that my own mother was used as a scapegoat in her family's drama and I don't care if I ever see any of them again. Not that I ever saw much of them before.

With these as our examples, my brothers and I are certainly forewarned and we don't want to behave badly. About ten years ago, Mum called me up and said that she just wasn't getting any use out of her classic Mustang now that they lived in the woods and she proposed to have a lottery for it when we all came down to visit that summer. That Mustang was the only thing me and my brothers might have had hard feelings about after our parents die, as we all felt a claim to it: I was the only kid never given a classic Mustang as my first vehicle (I guess they were more common in 1980s Alberta, and to be fair, I adored the 63 Polara Dad restored for me instead), and as the only girl, I felt a claim to our mother's car; Ken wants everything because he's the oldest, lol; and Kyler – although he had been paid for his efforts – had sanded down every inch of that car when Dad first got it and he was forced to give up his own Mustang when they moved to Ontario. To prevent any hard feelings, I said to Mum, “Fine, but take my name out of the lottery. I don't want the bad blood.” She called me back a while later and said, “Ken told me the same thing. Do you really want me to just give it to Kyler?” That wasn't what I intended, but it felt good, so I said OK. When we were down that summer, it was a chaotic visit, with friends of Kyler's showing up more or less uninvited and one of them crashed an ATV into a tree. With all of the stress of the extra people and the broken machine, Dad went off on Ken; the one who is forced to absorb most of Dad's rage anymore. As we were at the campfire one night, Ken tried to lay out Dad's point of view and wanted to get us to agree that our friends shouldn't come down with us ever again. Kyler kept protesting that he never told Mark he could come, and Ken kept suggesting, “But in the future, you could probably make it clear that he shouldn't come” – even though the last thing our Mum said to Mark and his family was, “Please come any time”. This wasn't really a fight between my brothers, everything was calm with no raised voices, when all of a sudden, Kyler threw his beer bottle against the boathouse wall, where it smashed to shards and sprayed us with beer, and he boomed, “Then maybe I'll never come again either” (there may have been expletives in there, too, but it was that exploding bottle that sticks out in my mind). He then stomped up the stairs to the boathouse apartment, Christine jumped to her feet, and before stomping up the stairs herself, she lectured, “Maybe you guys will finally learn when to stop pushing him.” I was more stung by her words than his (How long has she been wanting to put us in our places? Does she hate us? Has she always?) but mostly, I was incredulous that the first time Kyler ever freaked out on us was when his Mustang – that Ken and I pretty much gave to him – was sitting right behind us in the driveway. I knew I had to let it go as a done deal, but that was the first that I understood inheritance regret; that maybe something inequitable had happened.

I'm over it now, of course; especially since Kyler gave Dave his 74 Dart to even things up and Ken got an old Jeep from Dad – all fair and squarish (because those three vehicles are equivalent, right?). As for today, I am executor of my parents' estate (should I really say executrix even though that sounds slightly sexist to me, like poetess?), and as such, Dad has shown me their will. Everything is to be split in three, and his hope is that I'll just sell their house with contents included to prevent too much effort or potential squabbling. Since I don't want to be the only one to know our parents' business, I shared the plan with my brothers. Ken said, “Perfect”. But Kyler said, “Now, wait a minute. Why would we need to sell the house? We go there every summer and I love it – shouldn't all three of us have to agree before it can be sold?”. Oh, boy. Will that be a problem?

And here's the thing about our parents' house – it's a beautiful big log home on a pristine lake, deep in the woods of Nova Scotia. It's a twenty hour drive from where we all live, and although we have all brought our kids there every summer of their lives (OK, I didn't go last year), I would be fine with never having to go down there ever again. I didn't grow up there, my memories of it include my little brother smashing a beer bottle in anger, and it represents more obligation than vacation to me. Not to mention that my Aunt Shirley lives in the area, cursing my family if she ever thinks of us at all. If my parents died tomorrow (which they won't, they're still in their 60s), I would be happy to never go to NS again, and as I said above regarding my mother's family, I don't care if I go to PEI again either. Clearing out their house would be so much easier than Plum Johnson's task in They Left Us Everything: there is simply nothing of sentimental value in my parents' house. They haven't kept any furniture from our childhoods, there are few photo albums (and what is there could be copied for each of us), and there are no family heirlooms. There's plenty of value in their assets, but Dad is right: it could be sold with contents included and none of us would be the poorer. My hope is that that decision won't be ours to make in the end anyway: even though they're still relatively young, my parents are having trouble keeping up with the maintenance of that big house and property, and they might just sell it themselves. That will remove our toughest decision, but introduce a new one: would we still bother to visit them every summer if they no longer live in a big house on a lake? 

Update: Kyler and his family came up to watch the Victoria Day fireworks, and coincidentally, he had an opportunity to complain about our Aunt Carole's dismissal of him that time in PEI. We were standing in Ken's garage, having some beers and chatting, and Ken came through and said, "Hey Kennedy, you don't have a drink. Help yourself to anything in the fridge there."

Kennedy is of drinking age, so this wasn't some big "coolest uncle ever" move, but it was friendly and welcoming and what you might expect from a relative. I turned to Kyler and said, "Don't you wish we had an Aunt or Uncle across the street from us when we were growing up? Don't you wish we could have had something like this?"

Kyler shrugged and said, "No. We don't have one Aunt or Uncle that I would have wanted to grow up around. Remember that time I went down to PEI.."

"Yeah, and Carole..."

"Yeah, and she was our favourite." Turning to Kennedy, "I mean, she was our favourite. The cool one."

"Yeah, I heard," said Kennedy, swigging at her beer.

Not long after, Mal came through the garage and said to Kyler, "Hey, Noopy, you bring me a birthday present?"

Kyler shrugged and said, "No, I guess not."

"So what?" Mal asked. "I gotta wait for Christmas again before I get another birthday present out of you?"

Kye shrugged again, and after she was gone, he asked me, "What? Does she really expect a birthday present out of me? Every year? At her age?"

Kyler and Christine are her godparents, and while Ken and Lolo make a big deal out of being Kennedy's godparents, Mallory ain't so lucky.

I said, "You don' have to worry about it."

"But do you guys? Do you always give each other birthday presents?"

"Well, we do live right across the street from each other..."

"Yeah, that makes a difference, I guess."

And there you go: As little kids, it was confusing to me and Kyler that our godparents didn't seem to care about us -- not the way that Ken's did -- and while I only remember meeting mine once (they were Mum's cousin and her husband -- people that Mum expected to be friends with forever, but were not), Kyler's were...our Aunt Carole and one of Mum's brothers, Uncle Billy. I would have thought that Kyler would remember how crappy our family ties were and decide to do better with out own nieces and nephews, but nope: Kye just might be the Carole of our generation.