What’s Lurking in the Basement

I have two neighbors, on the next block, who are obvious hoarders. Although a few houses apart, both have two or three cars parked in front of their houses and in the driveway that are jammed to the roof with their belongings. One house has a partially opened garage from which things are so tightly packed that some of them are leaking out. More of their possessions fill the front porch.

I don’t know these people, although I have seen an older woman out front occasionally, so I don’t know if these two overloaded houses belong to older people. But I do know it’s hard to get rid of your belongings as you get older.

I recently had visitors staying at my home, and I was dismayed to find that all my cabinets were too full to hide the bottles (of cleaning fluids, shampoos, etc.) that had been sitting on the floor. I don’t think of myself as a hoarder (and possibly my neighbors don’t either), but I can see that stuff accumulates without any visible effort on my part. And that if you don’t actively work to remove it, it stacks up into even bigger piles.

And then one day it seems irreversible and impossible to deal with. It’s too much. You don’t know where to start, so perhaps resignation clicks in. Most people might think of hoarding as a mental disorder, but for seniors it seems more a function of getting older, especially if you’ve lived in the same place for a long time and haven’t deliberately worked to rid your house of old belongings. The more you have, the more difficult it is to get rid of it.

It’s easier to ignore it, not pry too much into all the stuff that’s been moldering in the basement or the back of the closet for 30 years. I’m not sure I want to find out what’s in those steamer trunks that I brought to college more than 50 years ago. Opening it up would just open a can of worms. I’m guessing that I stored old letters that came from the time when people wrote long narratives to friends. Once I found those letters, I would want to read them, and I might be reminded of all kinds of things that I had forgotten: lost and found friendships, good and bad times that are quickly receding in my memory.

And then once I read them and let myself sink into the past for a while, I would have to decide what to do with the letters. Should I throw them out or save them? They are irreplaceable in so many ways, such as friends who are gone. Even the handwriting is precious in an era when almost no one writes letters anymore. (In fact, younger generations don’t even learn penmanship in school anymore.)

If I moved to a different home, do I want to carry treasured physical letters with me? There’s no guidebook for what to save from your long life and what to get rid of.  Was it the decluttering guru Marie Kondo who said, “if it doesn’t bring you pleasure, get rid of it”?  But what if these letters unearth deep feelings of both pain and pleasure?

Harder to get rid of are the larger physical objects. I’ve kept fine china cups that my grandmother once used. After my father died, I brought home the harmonica he played. I can’t throw out the recipe cards my mother wrote—even though I’m pretty sure I’ll never make chicken cacciatore again—one of our family’s favorite dishes. And in my bathroom sits a bottle of castor oil from my grandfather’s pharmacy in Chicago.

Do these physical objects carry a whiff of my long-dead ancestors?  Just looking at my mother’s handwriting brings her back–how organized and precise she was.  But why do I need to hold on to them? Am I holding onto the past that is long gone?

I have friends in their 80s now, who measure their time left. Will they have time to read “Moby Dick” again or should they donate it to the library? These are the decisions we must make now, and it’s painful, although rewarding, too, to rediscover the richness of our lives. Because I worked in journalism much of my life, I have hundreds of newspaper articles I’ve written. Some don’t mean anything to me, but I’m proud of a few, like the one that reported on the barriers that prevented women from getting ahead at the university.

But why do I need that anymore? It was a long time ago. The world has moved on, and so have I. What am I clinging to? Why is it important for me to remember that?

A friend just moved across the country to be close to her son. In the process she had to get rid of a lot, even though she lived in a small apartment. But when she arrived at her new home, she found it was smaller than she thought and had to pare down her belongings even more. It’s this process—paring down as our lives shrink and we get closer to the end—that is so difficult. No wonder so many people start stuffing their car with their belongings.