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.