The last of the hoard

Clutter, collecting, and finding things a new home

My dad pulled a box out of the basement: the last box of Uncle Ron's hoard.

I don't remember what year my great uncle died. Was I in eighth grade or ninth? While the timeline has blurred, it's not because he was an afterthought. After caring for his own parents, he moved a few blocks away from my parents so he could spend time with us.

During elementary school, my mom would drop my sister and I off at his house in the mornings. We sat in his cramped, dark, stifling living room and watched TV. I assume he unfolded and folded up the card table and chairs for us every morning. The space was so tight with two couches, a lazy-boy, a dresser, and shelves that the card table actually touched the TV screen. He fed us a bag of mini-muffins and a glass of orange juice, both of which had been placed on a tray, covered with a tissue, and microwaved to disinfect them. There were also vitamins, which he once caught me hiding behind some knickknacks.¹ 

He would drive us to the bus stop a few blocks away. We would sit in the car, wearing the neon beanies with pompoms he bought us, with the heat blasting oppressively in our faces, longingly watching our friends goof around, until the bus came. We eventually negotiated to wait at the bus stop with our friends, although he still waited in the car until he saw us safely on the bus. We walked home from the bus stop, our old mutt at our side.

Although I was at his house often, while he was alive I only traversed the four or five feet from the front door to my place in front of the television. My sister once used the bathroom, a departure from the script he wasn't prepared for. She came back wide-eyed. On the bus she told me about how there was an entire wall of tissue boxes, all the way up to the ceiling.

He was always kind to us. He bought us fascinating books on art, along with expensive art supplies. I was in awe of his wit, even if I wasn’t sophisticated enough to understand most of his jokes. Even as a child, I knew the horrible vitamins and obsession with heat loss was motivated by love. I didn't like going to his house because it was boring and awkward, but I found him fascinating. While we weren’t sure what to do with each other, I liked him.

It seemed like a cosmic joke when he developed melanoma. I had never seen him in the sun. He was a gentleman in a newsboy cap, scarf, fancy leather gloves, and tweed coat, even in summer. He didn't go outside unless he had a compelling reason. He wore rubber bands at the bottom of his shirt sleeves to keep a draft out. His whole house was draft proof, with insulating plastic over all the windows year-round.

It was a shock to find photos of him as a young man, goofing around on a beach somewhere in Italy. Perhaps that's where he got both the sun exposure and his obsession with colpo d'aria.

Before he died, he asked my mother to spend at least a year going through his hoard. He probably didn't say ‘hoard.’

We honored his wishes and then some, clearly. Here I am, flipping through newspaper clippings 25ish years after his death. I was hoping to find some charmingly dated research but things don’t change all that much. I knew he didn't follow mainstream health advice, but I was taken aback to see so many clippings from obviously scammy ads for miracle cures. He was so well read, so cultured. I thought he'd have a better bullshit detector. Anxiety and hope make us all gullible.

I take vitamins these days. Boring stuff like iron, magnesium, and a medley of Bs. This is a new thing, because the smell of vitamins in his house was so strong I couldn't bring myself to take any for a long time. Choking down the B vitamins was a struggle I only recently managed, after years of my nutritionally minded friends talking me into it. His kitchen was a GNC where all the bottles were open, releasing that distinctive odor. You could smell it from the porch and it grew until the kitchen left an odor on my clothes.

The neighbor on the other side of the fence claimed my uncle used to give his dog treats over the fence, which I don’t find credible. There was a dresser full of vitamins pushed up against the back door. The back door was duct taped shut. The backyard was overgrown with thorny plants. It had taken hours of chopping to get to the fence.

In Hoard, Georgie Evans asks what the border is between collecting and hoarding. Well, I can tell you. Uncle Ron inhabited that border land. It wasn't a hoard because it was tidy. Everything was in tissue boxes and file folders, mostly organized in bookcases, clearly labelled. I marvel at the lack of dust. How did he clean it? I forget how many vacuums we found, lost in their hiding places behind boxes and under couches wrapped in layers of protective covers.

It was not a collection because there was so much of it, most of it of no value. In an era before the internet was The Internet, he was on a mission to preserve and organize every piece of information he came across. Everything he was collecting was available to him at the local public library, were he comfortable exposing himself to whatever germs might have lurked there.

I suspect the emergency kits I found in every pathway were inspired by the fate of the Collyer Brothers. Most of the contents made sense as what you'd need to survive while waiting for my parents to wonder why he wasn't answering the phone and let themselves in to check on him. I still wonder why aloe vera concentrate made the cut. Given that he blocked all the exits and crammed his little 1950s box of a house, from basement to rafters, with paper, he really should have had fire extinguishers in every room.²

His hoarding wasn't a problem like it is for the people you see on the reality TV show Hoarders. His house was unusual in terms of the sheer amount of stuff it contained, but it wasn't horrific. We weren't wading through knee deep recyclables and takeout wrappers. There was no trash and there were narrow trails. There was a discernable order. He could always access his kitchen and bathroom. The NHS wouldn't have considered it a serious problem.

People hadn't stopped coming over because of his hoarding. The hoard grew because he became increasingly reclusive until he only needed space for my sister and I in front of the TV. When he had lived with his parents, when he had people over, it had been contained until he decided to allow less and less space for other people. He stayed in touch with friends through the mail and, presumably, over the phone. I know about his letters since he kept carbon copies of them all.³

The clutter image scale is used in context, so there's no need to critique it. It assumes there is stuff thrown on the floor and that stuff is mixed together. Clutter is not necessarily the same as hoarding. When a friend of mine lived with her boyfriend and two cats in a studio apartment that was 17x14', it usually ranked somewhere on the clutter scale. There was simply nowhere for things to go. The moment anything piled up, the cats knocked it onto the floor. They moved into a reasonably sized apartment and the clutter vanished.

My uncle's home, on the other hand, was always neat. He was unquestionably a hoarder, just not by the clutter scale. He could access his meticulously organized newspaper clippings through the maze. Still, even as a child, it was clear this was not quite right. We never debated whether or not it was a hoard house, we were just grateful we hit the jackpot on the type of hoard house it was.

For me, hoarding is about your risk of dying in a fire or falling and being lost in piles of stuff. Perhaps the question for others is about whether you can take something out of one home and use it in another. Lots of hoard homes that fit the stereotype involve pet and human messes. While they've saved things for posterity, those things are being ruined by vermin and mold.

Often they have stated charitable intentions — they’re going to fix it up and give it away, they’re going to sell it to pay for their grandkids to go to college, these are just undistributed acts of generosity. In reality, they buy tools, toys, supplies, food, clothes and then destroy it so no one else can ever use it. I understand saving things you might need in the future. I don't understand throwing those things on the floor (or in the yard) and climbing over the pile.

The things in my uncle's house were in a state where we could give them away. And give it away we did. I'd have preferred he just donated money and books to the library directly, but things eventually made their way there.

I tease my dad about being a hoarder,⁴ because occasionally we stumble on one of his doom boxes that appears to date from before my birth. His doom boxes have a certain Andy Warholesque time capsule vibe. Still, when I noticed a chair base he was saving for a future project was getting rusty, he agreed that it was time to give it away. He is so pleased when he’s able to use something that he’s squirreled away for 40 years, something he does occasionally do.

I was born into a cluttery family. Clearly, though, I was blessed, for their clutter isn't the kind that makes anyone gag. I point fingers knowing I'm one of them. I have a weirdly small amount of material objects, sure, but I can see my hoarding tendency in the maladaptive choices I make about what to keep.

The way the things I don't like enough to wear out slowly accumulate makes me understand why Marie Kondo was such a sensation. The expensive shoes my podiatrist recommended that turned out to be uncomfortable did not spark joy while they sat gathering dust in my closet for so many years. I left my sister to dispose of the boxes I'd forgotten in my mom's attic. I'd had my own home for several years and never went back for anything out of those boxes, yet I knew if I went through them I'd probably want to keep it all. I needed her to throw it away for me.

I have no trouble understanding why hoarding doesn't have a home in the DSM. It seems to be a symptom of many disorders, rather than a disorder on its own. The end of the ice breaker form lists many conditions that can lead to hoarding. There are many motivations behind similar looking behaviors. 

My uncle wanted a world of his own, free of other people's germs, and struggled to fit it into his little house. Perhaps if he'd been born a few decades later, his house would have been practically empty. Why bring books and newspapers inside and expose yourself to all that potential danger from dust, mold, and fire? He undoubtably would have gotten online subscriptions and ebooks.

Many people are simply overly ambitious about the projects they're going to complete, so their home fills up with supplies that never get used. Others bolster their sense of self by surrounding themselves with objects that reflect a certain type of person. Many hoarders seem to subconsciously push people out of their lives by making sure there is no room in their home for anyone else. All of these behaviors are relatable when practiced on the small scale. Most of us recognize when a coping behavior isn't working. Others double down and do more of it.

I've had friends who struggle with even the most mundane decisions, so I can imagine how deciding what to get rid of could be overwhelming. We’ve all put off tasks far longer than is reasonable. I struggle to imagine the thought processes behind the more extreme cases, where things are really unfit for human habitation. Preppers keep their stockpiles in good condition and rotate their nonperishables so they're safe to eat, while many hoarders could never safely eat or use their stockpiles. They can’t even safely inhabit their homes under everyday conditions. Isn't the unpleasantness of filth bigger than the anxiety of tidying up? People notice such different things, though. Tastes and smells my wife finds overwhelming don't even register with me. What I consider a normal amount of cat hair in a house is intolerable to her. She goes over all of our clothes with a lint roller before and after they go in the laundry. People are just calibrated differently. 

It's hard to see someone choosing to live in unsafe conditions and not know how to help. When someone is evicted for hoarding, people are often unwilling to have them move in with them. It’s understandable, since people with serious mental illnesses are difficult housemates. In the extreme, hoarding can lead to losing custody of children, criminal charges for animal abuse, fines from the city/HOA, eviction or a home being condemned, and being put in protective custody due to self-neglect. Thankfully, most people who hoard don't end up getting entangled in the legal system. Lots of people are dealing with more moderate hoarding situations on their own.

It's easy to suggest we focus on the underlying issues driving hoarding. To diagnose and treat their underlying conditions. To get someone involved with a life outside of hoarding so they make space for other people. To get them busy doing things that aren't going out and finding things. As if we can just sign someone up for a book club or block Amazon.

It's hard to accept that someone is choosing hoarding over their family and their health. They spend money on items they throw on the floor. They isolate themselves from friends and family. They create feuds with neighbors. All instead of contributing to their community and helping their family. They choose to leave behind a huge mess instead of the family home.

People do it all the time, though, with other coping methods they've become addicted to. It’s their choice to make. It's simultaneously simple and impossible to understand.

1. These knickknacks are now in my own living room, along with the painting he had hung next to the TV.

2. I was amused that a search for his name mostly turned up a book he illustrated, whose cover depicts firefighters rescuing a family from a burning home.

3. His letters hinted at a life before he became a recluse:

“In going through some of my old slides, i came across one i took of Tina back in 1947 when you were in the vet’s hospital covered from head to foot in cornstarch and confectionary sugar, and Annie was writing home heartrending letters with a two-inch pencil stub “…all alone out here in California like a dog…”

4. My dad rents his house on AirBnB during the tourist season, so we can safely say he is not a hoarder. He just has a habit of cramming all matter out of place into a box or bag, tucking it out of the way, and forgetting where he put it.