The Hoard Dispersed

The Baby Grand Excavated

Final tally: four 30 foot dumpsters, 350 contractor bags, 25 filter masks, a couple dozen pairs of rubber gloves.

Staging for the Garage Sale

So Mrs. R. haunted garage sales shuttling paper bags of pottery, and chipped figurines back to her repository. Now comes the culmination - the re-distribution of the collection. I've always enjoyed garage sales and the camaraderie they engender. But I'l never look at them in quite the same way again.

Altar of the Dispossessed

The Croquet Party

It would be premature to sum up the experience of this project but there are little areas which seem clearer. Mrs. R's disorder is much more common than people think but there is such shame that it remains in the closet, so to speak. And I believe there is a general cultural disorder at the root. We have all been defined by what we have. We are the most acquisitive culture in the history of the world and we are indiscriminate.

Notes:

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Periodical and Information Hoarding

A friend spoke about his wife who had a specific variety of the disorder. She could not let newspapers or periodicals go. And it was necessary for her to read the papers sequentially and completly. People were so frustrated with her piles that she eventually rented a storage space.

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Hoarding During Wartime

The same friend talked about the specific shame and alienation of hoarders during world war II. While people were rationed for essential nutrition and medicine, some people would hide supplies away. I think every family did this a little but if it was discovered that you had an unreasonable amount of something you would be shunned - or worse - driven from the community.

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Possibly Inherited Trait

Several times within the course of purging Mrs. R's hoard I've noticed her daughter slipping close to the behavior and several of this blog's readers have recounted stories about how their brothers, sisters, children or spouses slipped into the same destructive behavior. I'm not certain how Obsesssive Compulsive Disorder is structured within neurological biology but there is also - possibly a learned behavior.

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Finally...

Almost all of the care takers, family or friends who contacted me report that the hoarders, themselves don't seem to suffer specifically because of the hoarding. They are described as living in an alternate reality where there behavior is completly justified and everything has real value and the potential to be a treasure. There are certainly environmental and public health implications. And I think the saddest part of the whole equation is the fact that this disorder splits up marriages, families and friendships and deprives the hoarder of society.

Gawking on the Road

"Gawking on the Road to Compassion"

Mixed Media (Collage including Columbian volcano postage stamp

with surreal airplane cancellation and a steel engraving of a nautilus - circa 1890.)

5" x 5", 2006, Collection of Julie Osborne and Tim O'Hagan

This is a continuation of the previous entry brutally titled "HOARDING".

We've made amazing progress cleaning out the house. A crew of three of us have emptied two bedrooms, the study, two bathrooms and more and we've filled three 30 foot dumpsters containing over 250 black contractor bags stuffed with waterlogged clothes and the ephemera of a hoarder's treasure. The bones of the house have slowly reappeared. Walls appear where they should be and they terminate in perpendicular corners at the floors and ceilings. There is a slight echo. Mrs. R's museum is empty except for the cases.

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We've also filled dozens of 15 gallon plastic bins with treasures that could be considered salvage. The bins contain the objective booty of the treasure - the wheat from the chaf - which is comprised of porcelain figures from occupied Japan, milk glass and McCoy vases, at least four heavy cast punch bowls from those decades when punch was mandatory, etc. As we've worked we've tried to pull things of value from the sludge.

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The other two helpers are named Anthony and Daniel. They are amazing guys - sweet, compassionate and hardworking. They saw something of a mitzvah in the work. They talk about Mrs. R. and her compulsion with respect and empathy. Admittedly, some gallow's humor circulates among us but nothing that isn't due to this crew who've taken responsibility for an evacuation. Undertakers deserve that ghoulish laugh now and then.

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Yesterday, the wind and snow were blowing like Antartica. As we worked upstairs, the front door was blown open twice before we secured it with a 20 pound sack of salt. There have been ghostly thumps during this process - probably shadows of residual fears that provide sensations on the periphery. The incidents are announced with the same hushed phrase; "Did you hear that?" Ghosts make us pause in our work. Ghosts make us stop and wonder.

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Around 1:30 pm, Daniel tugged at his mask and safety goggles, "Did you hear someone downstairs?" Shuffling noises were confirmed and we descended to the front hall where a stranger stood surprisingly well inside. His embroidered jacket and cap both said "Water Department". He was a workman from the village.

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The water was shut off two months earlier when broken pipes froze and a glacier formed on the exterior of the house. When she was alive, Mrs. R. had a lengthy, running battle with the local civic bureacracy. Communitites need clear, practical policy to deal with hoarders and their families. As with any government intervention, there's a right way and a wrong way. Just cooked that blurb up. Feel free to quote.

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With proprietary authority I asked, "Can I help you?" I landed in front of him - between the rooms and his 6 foot frame.

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"I just saw your car and I'm with the Village and I wanted to see inside. So she died - right?" As he crained his neck he also entered my reasonable comfort zone. Around the male of our species this can mean many things. This time the transgression was a test for permission. Could he push his way through?

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"No." I replied, "I'm sorry. We're working. And the lady who lived here was a friend." A little tension was building when he added, "I just wanted to check it out." He felt no need for politeness or compassion and he was tipping against civility. There was no concern for me as a friend of this poor dead lady. For him there was only the desire to enter a long anticipated freak show.

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Casually and with no invention he let it blurt he said, "I just like to see how people could live like this." The phrase dangled mid-air like a huge yellow wasp. I couldn't summon indignation because that cold observation was part of my consciousness. In some ways I've been a gawker. I heard myself repeating these banal phrases as I worked him back out the door - back into the blizzard in the world and in his tiny mind; "It's a family matter and we're dealing with it. It's a sad situation. We're taking care of it."

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I felt the shame and protectiveness that children of hoarders must feel all the time. After he left in his Village truck my temperature started to go up. I was furious and my anger was confirmed by Daniel. "That was bullshit, man."

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We've all been gawkers on the road to compassion. Charity is filled with voyeurs. When we see tragedy, the mouth drops open a little and the neck muscles become elastic, fluid, spiral. The eyes awaken as camera lenses. The body braces like a tripod. I wonder if Buddha - during the earliest part of his journey to infinite compassion - didn't rubberneck a little.

HOARDING

Important link:

Support for Children of Hoarders.

Within 30 minutes of posting this story I received an email from a wonderful woman who volunteers for this non-profit (501c3) group. They share information and support.

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I’m helping an old friend clean out her “family house”. Her mom died six months ago and was afflicted with a compulsion commonly known as “hoarding”. If you are squeamish about this sort of thing – this blog entry is not for you.

Garage with tons of furniture, boxes & wrought iron, 6 feet deep.

It is hard to describe the environment and images can’t provide the truly dark sensibility of this situation. My primary feeling right now consist of empathy for my friend who is a wonderful, bright and kind woman who I’ll call “Elle”.

As we work together clearing several tons of garbage from the house I am occasionally frozen, staring into a pile of shoes, for instance and I am suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of frustration with her deceased mother. I’ll call her “Mrs. R.”

It’s ludicrous and unfair to blame Mrs. R. as she was mentally ill. Without warning, the activity of clearing her mess elicits truly dark thoughts. As I stuff the thirtieth black plastic contractor bag with waterlogged purses, shoes and blankets, my mind tries to project into hers. The layers of newspapers, bills, receipts, broken pottery and cheap figurines, the tangled masses of synthetic blouses and polyurethane cherubim all seem to represent some enormous endeavor on her part – she was putting resources away like a squirrel but the objects are only symbolic. Very few of them have practical use or value. The collective jumbled mass in this typical suburban home becomes representative of Mrs. R’s consciousness.

Elle's childhood bedroom.

I want to understand my own consumption and collecting habits better. And frankly, I have a morbid obsession about this subject. Oprah has treated it sensitively and pretty well so there must be some zeitgeist brewing, too.

Understanding the hoarding compulsion may inform a perspective of materialism. I have sensed the global culture rushing toward a new era. In whatever new age that is coming, we will certainly have to live with less.

Elle has coped alone with her mother’s issues for several decades. Recently she observed, “I do believe that hoarding and the resulting response - clutter control, is on the upswing. My new theory is that our society is more fearful and isolated than it ever has been, plus consumerism is at an all-time high. So, the former provide the fertile ground for hoarding, and the latter provides the tools for those so inclined.” See? I told you she was smart.

The floor of Mrs. R's bedroom.

The study packed so tightly that the door was a wall of stuff.
Underneath all of this is a Brambach baby grand piano.

Consumption signifies safety and identity. What you own is who you are. What you do doesn't really matter - as long as it grants access to crap.

Mrs. R. was certainly expressing herself and defining her self-image through the types of things she stuffed into every corner. Mrs. R., an ivy league educated woman with a minor in art history hoarded a certain aesthetic. The hoarding compulsion formed a kind of text about who she was. There is a semiotic nature to the “museum” of this tangled and compressed “collection”.

An 1920's celuloid vanity set with silver inlays consumed by mold.

Approximately 60 contractor bags of contaminated material represents less than 15% of the total mass to be removed.
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Day Four

This is my 4th day working on Mrs. R's bedroom and the first day that Elle didn't come. I'm trying to encourage her to stay away. The toxicity of the house aggravates her asthma and it has an acute emotional implication. When she comes to the house she will only stand in the entrance hall and only with the door open. She's done a lot but now she neds to get away.

It was a rough day because I got down to a level of stuff that predates the pipe bursting this winter - this is a level of water contaminated material that pre-existed the winter's damage by ten years. I would pull a handfull of clothing and find the stench of shit.

And I had to throw away two incredibly beautiful pairs of cat's eye glasses - pale yellow and cornflower celuloid and silver or marquesite jewels.

A strange deformed "hand" key chain.

When I was growing up on the south side I have an image of a sweet "crazy lady" called Garbage Granny. She lived in a two story house on 111th street in Mount Greenwood. For kids like me - especially for kids with a vivid imagination - Granny represented something romantic and fascinating. Her house was big and was supposed to contain the bodies of lost pets and perhaps even lost children. It was a ghost story fantasy combined with tin lithography and Saturday morning cartoon reruns. The primal fear always comes forward. Hanzel and Gretel. The Witch's hoard of candy and cake lures us toward an illusion.

None of our childhood dreams about Aladdin's cache or my personal treasure hoard - The Count of Monte Cristo - are represented or emerge from the filth of Mrs. R's house.

The garden filled with damaged cast concrete sculpture.

Mrs. R. spent hours painting the figures so the faces of the statues are sculpted in sliding layers of grey and white liquid pigments. It reminded me of this folk art church construction we came across in an antique store in Columbia, South Carolina. And again, the environment creates the very strong impression of being in the disheveled but potent mind of the person who created it.

A example of the compulsive "frosting" effect from a model church. Artist unknown (Columbia, South Carolina). 26" w. x 38" h. x 46" l.

Mrs. R. sought out tons of wicker, cast iron wall pieces - planters and benches. She had the idea of a garden in her mind and it was an overgrown, romantic place. So she created a dillapidated environment but somehow things got out of control - once the scales were tipped it all fell apart.

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Day 5

Lover Triumphant

Mixed Media on Plywood, Detail 36" x 24", 2007

Belated Valentine's Day greetings. It's been a busy week. Work on the Lover's Discourse took off and I'm helping a friend clean out her deceased mother's house. Her mother had a serious compulsion to hoarding. I'm fascinated with the process and the problem. I'm writing about hoarding as a symptom of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and as a cultural phenomenon.

v

February is my least favorite month except for the 14th which is like a beautiful red cardinal in the brittle, grey landscape. I've always appreciated V Day but this year - with the Barthes project - it had a different flavor. The linguistic analysis of that state hasn't dampened my belief in the magic of love.