The Secret Lives of Hoarders_ True Stories of Tackling Extreme Clutter - Matt Paxton [42]
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THE PLAYERS: RECRUITING A TEAM
The best-laid plans for a cleanup are only as good as what can be achieved by the people involved. In the previous chapter, we touched on the importance of having the hoarder as fully engaged as possible and the value of a strong support group of family and friends. But many of the aspects of a hoarder cleanup are beyond the capabilities of this core group, which means experts and professionals will need to be engaged in order to deal effectively with the emotional, psychological, legal, and physical issues.
A CONCERNED—AND PERSISTENT—NEIGHBOR
Daisy was an eighty-five-year-old retired schoolteacher who had been living by herself on a fixed income for many years. As frugal as she was tiny, she had spent the last two decades hoarding everything and anything in her efforts to save money, and with the secret hope that some of what she saved might be valuable or useful someday. Someone once told her that she could turn her old newspapers in for cash, but the piles of paper had become unmanageable. She saved soda bottle tops to donate to fund-raisers. She “recycled” (reused) her adult diapers. Daisy was just trying to save every penny possible and, in the process, filled her town house to overflowing.
Piled almost to the ceiling, the cleanup crew was afraid of what they’d find under all of Daisy’s clutter.
One morning Daisy’s neighbor noticed the frail and elderly woman struggling with her front door, obviously trying to get back into her house. She asked if Daisy needed help, and kept asking what she could do even when Daisy insisted that nothing was wrong. Eventually Daisy admitted that she was blocked from reentering because something had fallen against the front door, and neither she nor her kindly neighbor was able to budge it.
When asked, Daisy told her neighbor that she had no family and really nobody else to call for help. But after a while, she said that perhaps her pastor would be the best person to contact. When her pastor arrived some time later, he could see, even through the front window, the terrible state of the house. He immediately made his first of many calls to Adult Protective Services to find out what help might be available. APS, in turn, got Daisy a social worker and put her up in a nearby hotel while they figured out what to do next.
The social worker became Daisy’s main advocate. She put together Daisy’s team, starting with county building inspectors. The inspection resulted in condemning the house, which, ironically, made Daisy eligible for county support services and triggered a local government process designed to fix up homes to allow residents to continue to live in them.
The social worker also connected Daisy with affordable medical care, so that she could get back on her medications and have regular checkups, both of which she had given up. Given her advanced years and late-stage hoarding, the social worker knew that Daisy wasn’t likely to change her ways, so she didn’t seek counseling help for her but rather focused on getting her a safe, clutter-free house, medical care, and a caretaker to help keep Daisy’s life in order.
In addition, the social worker also engaged the services of a financial advisor whose job was to figure out Daisy’s financial situation—how much money she had and what she owed—to see if she could continue to live on her own. And the social worker also called my company to clean out Daisy’s house.
During the cleaning, the building inspectors checked in every other day to verify that the house was safe and to evaluate what repairs needed to be made. The financial planner came to collect important paperwork. The social worker stopped by each day to make sure Daisy was stable, emotionally and physically. She was also making sure that the cleanup crew was finding and passing along Daisy’s family silver and lost checks. A rotating group of about thirty fellow church members came to