She Paid For the Bottle...

Before cable television introduced the world to the world of hoarding, my husband and I established a company on a mission to do just that.

The idea grew from the sorrow of watching our good friends suffer first the loss of an extraordinary man and then the subsequent and substantial loss of his estate because of the condition of his home.

Since July 2005, we have had the privilege of working with a memorable cast of clients.  We have enjoyed amazing, addictive successes and heartbreaking failures and we have learned.

I tell snippets of their stories in the hope of shining a tiny penlight into overwhelming darkness that is this disorder.

The first time "B" called, her only question was "how does this work" and our only answer was "however you need it to work."

She was in trouble with the management of her retirement community because her neighbors regularly complained about the odor emanating from her apartment.

She had been in therapy for 15 years, had a senior services case manager and a social worker and, still, this was not her first rodeo on this issue.

But we, of course, did not know this.

She had buried herself in paper; newspaper, mail, magazines, flyers, expired coupons and post-its; bits and pieces that had become rolling, unstable hills 3 and 4 feet high.  She climbed over these mounds into tiny spaces that allowed her to sit in one armchair and sleep in a corner of her queen sized bed.

"Cat" was her only friend and constant companion and the primary source of the smell.  "B" believed that her unreasonable neighbors should have been satisfied by the small, round can of odor eatere she placed outside her door.

She and I spent 4 months together, 4 days a week, 4 hours at a crack while she touched and sorted each piece of paper into save, store, let it go.  As the piles came down, our relationship built up.  We spoke primarily of cabbages and kings; nothing too personal or intimate. 

One day, nearing completion, she confided, "I have a secret."

"B" owned a house; a beautiful colonial, paid off in full years ago by years of her own hard work, in a very desirable neighborhood.

She had been removed from her home after years of legal notices, pleadings, threats, offers of assistance and court appearances.  The village had been forced to declare it uninhabitable.

The legal issues again surfaced because the stability of the structure was now in question.

If the apartment was where she buried her present, the house was the graveyard of her past.  All those who had judged her, ridiculed her, left her, died on her, betrayed her rested uneasily there under racoon and rodent feces.

Her wedding pictures were buried beneath kitchen garbage, her mother's diamond ring was careless in a plastic pill box "somewhere" and her son's childhood toys and awards molded in the collapsed sun room.

With her support team in tow she went forth to resume battle with the code inspectors.  They demanded clean out in 30 days.  We assured them it could be done in a week.  "B" held that it was impossible to do inside of a year.

She was determined to keep them safely and soundly buried.  We were threatening to set them all free.

I had to send the trapper in first.  He snared 4 dominant male racoons and a host of other woodland residents and told us after a week he could not guarantee he had gotten them all.

We worked with her for a year and a half; 2 to 3 times a week for as long as she could focus her attention.  We stood by her side during court continuances, drove her to medical and legal appointments, met with her support team, conferred with her frustrated attorney, put a plan in place, revised the plan in place.  We took her out for Thanksgiving, exchanged gifts at Christmas, accepted her gift on the birth of our 2nd grandchild, spent hours on the phone, kept confidences she had told no one else, had long distance education sessions with her long distance family members, reached out, on her behalf, to her estranged son.  We talked her out of the house in freezing temperatures and suffocating heat and, on several occasions, the dumpster.  In the end she severed our relationship over tissue paper.

Just yesterday, we received a call from the storage facility where she had us take some 23 boxes of magazine from the apartment.  She has us listed as her next of kin.

We haven't heard from her in 2 years.