The Secret Lives of Hoarders_ True Stories of Tackling Extreme Clutter - Matt Paxton [13]
After retirement, Lucy wasn’t making cakes anymore. But she continued buying pans and accessories. The mind game in which she was engaged made it very difficult for her to part with her baking tools, for example, because letting those go meant giving up the anticipated rewards—by way of compliments and recognition—that she hoped to get, no matter how unrealistic her expectations might have been.
▶ The Collector
Jackson, a tall, muscular, and well-dressed man in his late thirties, always made eye contact when he talked, a skill that he used effectively in his job as a city social worker. To the outside world, Jackson seemed confident and successful.
At home, Jackson hid an obsession with the rock group Blondie. His memorabilia collection had begun to overflow from his two spare rooms into the entire house. Jackson had spent years buying Blondie items at auctions and online, including T-shirts, ticket stubs, albums and CDs, DVDs, posters, pins, and signed prints.
Blondie represented a time for him when he was young, carefree, and happy. But in his attempt to hang on to that time of his life, his mania had taken over his spare time and space. He was living in the past, and wasn’t free to explore happiness in the present.
Like many hoarder collectors, Jackson rationalized that there was real value in this memorabilia aside from its emotional value. But it is rarely the real value of the stuff that makes collectors flip into hoarders.
Most famously, William Randolph Hearst was a hoarder obsessed with collectibles. Certainly his vast collections of art, antiques, and furniture that filled his beautiful mansion in San Simeon, California, were valuable. But he collected so much that the overflow went into storage, never to be seen again after he purchased it. Today San Simeon is a museum, with so much to see in the rotating exhibitions that there are five different tours.
▶ The Food Saver
Janelle had a kitchen full of cans that were twenty years old. She guessed that her refrigerator hadn’t been opened in sixteen years—there was too much clutter stacked up in front of it. As soon as we cracked it open, two of my workers started vomiting.
The bins and drawers were full of dark liquid and two inches of green black muck that had once been lettuce. We found black eggs, which at first we thought were carved stone eggs. The food was so moldy that it had all grown together into one gnarly mess.
On the pantry shelves, a lot of the cans were empty. When we looked at them closely we discovered holes gnawed in the bottom. (Rats can get into a can, and once they’re in, they’ll clean it out. And because they’ll stay in a house until there’s no food left, Janelle, like most food hoarders, had a severe vermin problem.)
In her mid-sixties, Janelle had raised a family of five boys, all of whom had long since grown and moved away. Her husband had died several years ago, but Janelle was still shopping for bulk food bargains. Her habit continued to spiral out of control, even after her kitchen became all but unusable because of the clutter.
Food hoarders are some of the most reluctant to admit they have a problem. They are often very defensive, arguing that it’s not a big deal. Maybe that’s because everyone eats, so a food hoarder seems to be collecting something “sensible” that anyone would want.
Food hoarding is exacerbated because hoarders are big on buying food very close to or past its expiration date. Their excuse is that marketers just make up those dates to get customers to buy more food. Even when the cans on Janelle’s shelf were bulging, she sometimes ate the contents anyway because she figured the food was safe after it had been cooked. Not surprisingly, her sons were becoming increasingly worried about her health.
The more I work with food hoarders, the more I think their problem may come from a