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My new client, Sarah, opened the door and I immediately recognized the cluttered scene behind her. Sarah was a hoarder. Her kitchen counter as well as every available nook, cranny and flat surface was piled high with stuff – mostly papers but still included all the other artifacts hoarders are drawn to: recyclables, bags, books, junk sale goodies.
Sarah was a cheerful, senior lady, walker bound but eagerly awaiting scheduled hip surgery and looking forward to “doing things for herself” once again. The Director of her Senior Apartment complex was requiring her to clean up her act or be evicted for creating a fire hazard.
My initial interview with Sarah gave me the insight I needed to know how to coax her out of some of her precious junk. This is a tender business – hoarding clients are usually emotionally fragile and obsessed with their stuff. No so, Sarah- a decidedly atypical hoarder.
Sarah confessed that she had always been a clutterer and a saver and she came by it honestly – the child of a teacher and a scientist. My experience with hoarders is that academics are always the worst – they see possibilities and uses for everything!
In this case, however, there was a lot more to Sarah’s “hoarding”. Sarah had become the keeper of the family history and all the records required therein. Contained in her myriad of boxes were the birth, death and marriage certificates of every person in her family, also the forgotten artifacts of lost loves and failed marriages. Why, I asked, did she have to keep her daughter in law’s birth certificate? Sarah’s reply, was that her daughter in law didn’t want it. In addition, Sarah had done extensive research on the military career of a family member. She had become the keeper of neglected memories. She also confessed that she was keeping the “might want it someday” belongings of three of her adult children. They claimed they wanted it but didn’t have room for it. So it was OK for Sarah to store it and navigate around it in her walker in a tiny apartment? It reminded me of a client of mine who was keeping the wedding dresses of all five of her married daughters because “they just didn’t have the room”.
So the purpose of Sarah’s story is that hoarding, while a complicated issue, cannot always be placed sorely on the shoulders of the sufferer. How much of that stuff really belongs to other family members? If you are a relative of a senior who has a tendency to “keep everything”, you might want to consider offering to take your stuff back – you don’t have to tell them what you are going to do with it. Please just take it. You can be sure that Sarah’s family is going to be given back their birth certificates and other items that really belong to them. If they don’t want them, so be it. It won’t be part of Sarah’s “problem” any longer.