Sorting Dreck From True Treasure
Early in March, when a voice in my mind cautioned me against venturing down into the basement, I responded to its curt You’ll be sorry! in the same way the central character in a low-budget horror flick always reacts to such warnings. I didn’t listen. Instead, I crept down the steep flight of stairs and peered into the dark: the space was so cluttered, it looked like the clearance department at Macy’s. I scrambled back up into the kitchen and closed the door with a bang.
As I retreated into my oh-so-tidy breakfast room, I wished that I had spared myself the visual, which confirmed what I hadn’t wanted to admit—that barely controlled chaos had claimed a large part of my home. That basement held a hodge-podge of household crap and items judged to be “family treasures,” those that had been gathering layers of dust for years. Not quite the minimalist you prefer to believe you are, hmm? my inner voice crooned. Although it is impressive that you’ve managed to avoid thinking about all that you’ve squirreled away for so long.
Now, a new fear arose. How, I wondered, could that basement be mine? While I’d never felt the need to jump on the “keep only what sparks joy” train espoused by professional organizer Marie Kondo, neither had I thought of myself as a proponent of stockpiling. And yet the evidence seemed solid that I was. As I reflected on why I had hazarded a trip into the land of “precious” but abandoned possessions on this particular day, I opted for a truth impossible to refute: I’d been preoccupied all that morning, thinking about my dear Aunt Vivian, who had died this past fall.
Or, more accurately, it was all those chock-a-block rooms in her house that my cousin, Caroline, Aunt Viv’s only daughter, had told me about after the memorial service which had been imprinted on my mind. The nightmare of what Caroline faced still haunted me, but it was a nightmare that I also sensed might be valuable if I wanted to better understand this elder whom I’d loved. Didn’t it make sense that this is what spurred me to risk facing what I hadn’t wanted to see there—then—and quite suddenly here—now—in my own home? I shivered as I came to the central question: was I a packrat, too?
My mentally sharp, ninety-year-old aunt, (who was also strong-willed and had a refreshingly dry sense of humor) had left behind a townhouse packed to the ceiling, and a storage unit the size of a two-car garage. She’d lived independently but had rarely entertained visitors, so it was not surprising that so few of us had suspected the scale of this cache. At her memorial service, Caroline had confided in me that she was “in a muddle” whenever even contemplating the work ahead of her, work which she felt she couldn’t handle alone. It was then that I’d offered to help as she decided what to keep and what to pitch. No selling the house until all of the mess was sorted and then dispensed with.
When had Aunt Viv crossed the line from being a collector to becoming a hoarder? I pondered an hour later, the moment I stepped through the door of her home. As I moved from room to room, I had time to make a preliminary tally of just one section: first off, nineteen DVD players, fourteen bags of worn blouses and skirts, and a dozen old throws in just one corner. Was it really possible, as some research findings postulated, that hoarders often find comfort—and, more importantly—“safety”—when surrounded by so much rub
It was an idea that I personally found difficult to imagine. For me, a home in disorder and bags of clothing to be donated were guaranteed to evoke painful childhood memories of growing up poor, living in cramped quarters, and being expected to accept with cheer others’ discarded coats and shoes. As a kid, I’d abhorred being pressed by my mother to appear grateful to my well-intentioned benefactors, who contributed to the church’s well-stocked charity. But all I’d really felt back then was embarrassment and shame. Which might have been why—as an adult—I had hidden away my own discards and/or keepsakes in the basement, out of sight.
What emotional boogeymen had haunted her, I wanted to ask Caroline, surmising that if it was a feeling of safety that Aunt Vivian had sought, she must have felt the need to be protected for many years. However, upon seeing the exhaustion in my cousin’s eyes, I chose not to ask any of the many questions I had. Instead, I spent my long hours of service digging through boxes in the shed—while Caroline tackled the thrift shop acquisitions that filled nearly every nook and cranny in each part of the house—and then stuffed the discards into big black trash bags. In this process, I discovered only a smidgen of items that were salvageable—and a boatload that was junk. The work was physically taxing, and when I’d finally locked the emptied repository, it was with relief.
Driving home late that night, while mentally rifling through the possible psychological causes of my Auntie’s behavior—including whether she’d met the criteria for obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, or had just suffered a steady cognitive decline due to her age, I found myself thinking about an insightful article I’d first read some years before, titled “The Museum of You Does Not Have a Gift Shop” (The New York Times, October 25, 2017).
The piece, written by psychiatrist Ana Fels, eschewed clinical judgments and blame; it covered instead the phenomenon of actually hoarding physical objects. She noted trenchantly that while it becomes necessary for us to let go of some of what we collect over the years, it is also important to concede that “when we discard a person’s accumulated possessions, we are throwing out the record of a life.” Surely Fels was right: before I’d even pulled my car into our driveway, my initial relief at finishing this task had given way to a sadness that would be felt long after my body aches had disappeared.
In the days since my look-see into my own abode’s vault and the last bags of storage unit trash from Operation Clean-Out were hauled away, I’ve been able to step back from any irrational fear that, as happened to my aunt, I might one day find myself in the country where hoarders live. In fact, I am now certain that I will not even develop into a packrat. Given my history and my neatnik tendencies, it seems far more likely that my own compulsions, such as they are, will continue to track more toward order than any real tolerance for disarray. Simply put, I just don’t fit the stasher profile. I realize that I am not one of that clan. I simply worry that—as evidenced by my basement—I have a tendency to hang onto things I no longer need or that are outdated.
Now, after sorting and making decisions about my aunt’s effects, I am finally making a plan for the surplus on the ground floor of my home. I am preparing myself for a sweep down there, one that I expect will be more about letting go than holding on. If all goes as planned, I will finally be saying goodbye to the well-crafted tables and chairs, the stained glass lamps, and the oak desks and bedframes that first found a home there after Phil and I combined households and blended our families in 2006. We had hoped that eventually, despite what our baby-boomer friends had reported about their attempts to gift their belongings onward to a new generation, such generosity would be well-received. But now I saw the need to simply get rid of “stuff.” Why didn’t our millennial “kids” take us up on the offer and recognize our generosity to contribute something from our lives to them? Hadn’t our generation been thrilled when our parents turned us loose in the attic to furnish our new digs?
But as my husband reminds me, “We’re not on-trend, Terry. There’s not a chance that these girls would accept any kind of furniture from us—no matter how solid or nice. Don’t you get it: their generation doesn’t do ‘brown.’ And now, not surprisingly, I hear from a friend that you might as well forget willing them the valuable heirloom silver handed down to me from my great grandmother: their generation doesn’t do polish, either.”
While I regret not having contacted our local women’s shelter a long time ago, I take solace in the knowledge that there are many folks in our region—those with financial situations such that they cannot buy themselves a “solid” piece of furniture—who will be happy and pleased to discover my donations. I am comforted, too, in knowing that I will soon be meeting up again with Caroline for an afternoon when I hope to trade stories about Aunt Vivian that are both tender and droll.
And if at any point, the snippy voice within my mind suggests that I should avoid “going deep” with my cousin about what’s in that memory box she now carries, you can be sure I won’t listen. There’s a lot, after all, that we may want to remember. And a lot that we may hope to unpack.
