Stories in this episode: After her elderly father passes away, LuAnne finds herself in the thick of cleaning out his home as she struggles to know what to let go of and what to keep; Jessie receives her inheritance a little early only to lose it just when it was needed most; After a string of disappointments, Miya is surprised to discover the resilience she longs for in the form of two pieces of paper from a beloved ancestor. Show notes: To see pictures and links for this episode, go to LDSLiving.com/thisisthegospel Transcript: KaRyn 0:03 Welcome to This is the Gospel, an LDS Living podcast where we feature real stories from real people who are practicing and living their faith every day. I'm your host, KaRyn Lay. So help me out. I cannot be the only one who has a highly developed internal fantasy in the style of Great Expectations, where a previously unknown relative of unimaginable wealth shows up at my door with the life changing news that I am the heir to their vast fortune. And from that moment forward, I pay all my bills without juggling anything, and I add avocado to every salad and every sandwich — devil may care about the additional cost. Is it just me? Okay. All right. That's fine. Nothing to see here, folks. I think it might actually have been this fantasy that got me thinking about today's theme. When you push through all the worldly ideas about wills and rich uncles and millions of dollars, this idea of an inheritance is as deeply ingrained in the gospel of Jesus Christ as just about anything. Mentions of heirs and heritage and inheritance are everywhere in the scriptures. And in fact, one of my all-time favorite scriptures, Romans 8:17, has the Apostle Paul reminding us all that we are children of God, and if we're children of God, then we are also heirs to His throne, and joint heirs with Jesus Christ. I just love that idea. I come back to it again and again, when I'm worried that all that will ever get handed down to me are some genetically soft teeth — I'm serious, they're made of chalk — and a penchant for drama. Well, today, we've got three storytellers who are surprised by the things that are handed down to them. And the way that that inheritance changes their perspective on the things that matter most. Our first story of inheritance comes from LuAnne, who worked her way through a mountain of memories to find that what her parents actually left her belonged to her all along. Here's LuAnne. LuAnne 2:03 My three brothers and my sister and I are gathered around the kitchen table of our childhood. We've come in from three time zones, and we've gathered for the weekend. We haven't been together as siblings for — probably since our first brother left home for college. So this is unusual. The reason that we're gathered here today is that my dad has passed away eight weeks previously, and we're here to make a plan to sell his house and to distribute his belongings. And we lost our mom 12 years prior to this time. With my dad, though, 12 years later, we, we lost him and he'd been struggling with Parkinson's disease for three years. And even though five of us are gathered, it feels really empty. My siblings and I are sitting around the kitchen table. And actually, we kind of just fell into our spots that we had in our childhood of where we ate dinner. And it's daunting because we're going through the things of my dad's lifetime, and my mom's lifetime and we're deciding are we going to donate something? Are we going to hang on to it? If so, who gets it? You know, we've seen other families go through this process and have a lot of conflict and leave where they're not friends or close anymore. And that was something that we that we didn't want. And we decided we wanted to try to make a plan that would be impartial and non-emotional. We knew that we were all filled with emotions, we were all grieving still. We didn't really think it was possible to take out all our emotions from this process, but we did want to try to have a process that would try to minimize those misunderstandings that we thought would be happening because we all were coming with so many emotions. And we sat there and we started with a prayer. And the way we did our picks is we each choose a color and that color was equivalent to the first pick, the second pick, the third pick — on down. Like we have things sectioned out like quilts, family keepsake quilts, and we had figurines and we had furniture and so we each would choose something in the group of items. And then after we'd gone through our picks, then we would snake through. So number five would be number one. And then every so often, we would redo our drawing just so the same people weren't getting the first pick in every group of items. And so we did start going through things and we could tell as we went through things, what they cared about by how they kept it. For instance, my dad's Navy uniform is dry cleaned. All three dress and casual uniforms are dry cleaned and hanging in his closet in a bag. We also found things that weren't, weren't so cared for like his files, he may have a birth certificate and a file along with a grocery store receipt. And some other thing that we would have thrown away. Or, the drawer with the kitchen utensils had kind of odd things in the drawer, so that wasn't really something he cared about. The Navy uniform, carefully kept. One thing that my parents kept was Swiss bells that they hung on the wall. And part of our heritage is our grandparents came from Switzerland. And our parents had gone on a trip to Switzerland and then came home with these bells and hung them on the wall. That was by the backdoor. So we all remember as kids, you know, making the bells ring as we ran out the door — in or out the door, we often just kind of did that as habit. To see and discover the things that my dad cared about and my mom cared about too, um, was kind of like a treasure hunt. It was putting together memories, my own memories that I had, but also stories that I heard. And putting the pieces of our life story felt like a treasure hunt to me. I started to understand the role these belongings played. The first and most obvious one is probably the belonging or whatever item reminded me of my mom or my dad, either something they had made by my mom and made by hand or my dad carefully selected it at a furniture store, or maybe he had redone it, and it could take us to our mom and dad, but also, I realized that it was a memory, for me, of who I was as a little child. And how my mom and dad made me feel as a little child. How they made me feel safe, and secure and loved. And so – an object could mean a whole lot more than – as important as that was, it was the memory of my mom and my dad, but I found that it was a memory of who I was. And who I was as part of this family, and that I belonged. And that – even the feeling of being a little child where your parents take care of you and you're not the adult out fighting in the world and making decisions and making adult decisions for your dad's life or death decisions for, for his care. And so I found that the objects took me back to being a cared for, loved, little child. Sometimes we're in business mode of going through things. And other times just one – something would hit us. Like when my brothers were carrying buckets of wheat from the basement to take to the garage to get rid of, I walked into my parents bedroom. They have a big master closet, and this is the place where their personal items have always been. Their clothing – they've kept family heirlooms like quilts that both grandmas have made, they've kept the tape recording of my sister's funeral. They've kept things that are special to them. And it's been full of their memories and memories that we had of them. But when I walked into the room by myself into this empty closet, that, to me, was stunning. It was just the sight of this empty closet that had always been full. It took my breath away, and I had to just stand there a moment and feel the finality of this. This is it. You know, this is the last tie to my mom and dad, and it was like shutting the door and walking into my new role. Not as a caregiver, not as a daughter who has parents on the earth, not – but as the you know, the final buffer, the adult for the family – generation one. But that was the, the feeling of just the finality of seeing this empty closet. There was this one item that had emotions around it for more than one of us. This one piece that was the one thing – if I could only choose one thing that I wanted, was this wooden cabinet that I used to open the door and, and I loved the smell of it. The wood smell. So we kept piano music, we kept magazines in there and I used to, as a little kid, open the door and smell. And you know how smells can take you back to smells and music and sounds and sights? And that's something that took me back to the safety and security of my childhood. And so we weren't sure even with all of our planning and processing, we still had emotions, we still had feelings that – that caused some division between us, and we had to walk away. So we walked away. When I walked away, I felt frustrated. And I felt like I thought we had figured out, you know, the process for this and, and so I felt frustrated and, and helpless. And, um, I felt inner turmoil. And so I just had to walk away from the situation, as did everybody else. Monetary stuff is super easy. You divide it, you take the pie and divide it five ways, but things. . . So I was so frustrated that it was about a thing, an item, because we've been through so much, through our childhoods and through caring for our dad and that this, you know, that one thing, this one thing, could cause division. I was worried how our relationship would play out. If we had these emotions and this discord now, would it seep into the future? That was my worry. Wh
