So here’s what’s been going on with me.
I’ve been helping my partner clean out their childhood home, within which their widowed mother had been living alone and hoarding all manner of things for roughly a decade.
After learning that she hadn’t been treating her diabetes or fixing the plumbing for half a year and local relatives were treating the situation with something close to criminal neglect, my partner came back to right the course of the whole situation. I’m now here too.
We’re living in this house now, in a bedroom that was better maintained than the rest of the house. Most of the cleaning was done before I arrived so the smell was bearable, but I have filled about five contractor bags with garbage since we arrived a week ago. Will have six more filled by the end. I wash my hands about ten times a day. Every time I do, the water runs gray.
My partner and I have been successfully keeping each other sane through all of this. There’s a lot to do, though.
Wedding rings and precious China are wrapped in nests of old bedding and plastic bags. Letters from dead and missed relatives are stored in index card cases that you find inside shoeboxes full of old telephone bills and expired coupons. Porcelain wedding gifts full of candies are stored in cheap plastic cases in an effort to preserve the moment as it was, but the mice find it and crawl in and hollow it out, leaving their excrement inside the vase and its protective container.
She keeps everything because she wants it to be important, but she can’t recognize that making everything important doesn’t have the effect she wants. So much of her hoarding speaks to a longing for people she likes, or things she finds pretty, but she didn’t feel confident or ready enough to ever reach out so she stored the things she loved the most in safe places where she couldn’t find or use them and she didn’t send the presents she kept buying for nieces and nephews.
We really want this woman’s final decade or so of life to be her best. We’re renovating her bedroom and adding all the kitschy regency-style items she’s collected over the years to make it into the kind of room she’d never dare to ask for. We found her tea service items and by god, we’re going to make sure she gets to use them. We’re going to help her make friends. Probably by getting her involved in Jane Austen message boards or something. Her eyesight’s bad, but we’re patient and fast typists.
The patterns of accumulation are interesting. I have full boxes labeled “unused potholders”, “empty picture frames”, “home ec/organizing books”, “cookbooks”, “cookie molds”, “Christmas ornaments”, “cookie cutters”, “unused scrapbooks.” Her only filled-out scrapbook chronicles her husband’s side of the family.
The strongest impression I get is of a level of loneliness and disconnection that will warp a person.