I\u2019ve always prided myself that I am the only one in my generation on my mother\u2019s side of the family who is not a hoarder. But given that I have made my 2026 project going through decades of file cabinet accumulations, I may have to modify that claim ever so slightly.<\/p>\n
The good news (besides dispensing with tons of paper) is that I\u2019ve gotten a number of columns out of these anthropological digs. I did a series of three columns from a folder of memos to team parents when I managed my younger son Henry\u2019s traveling soccer team. I recently quoted from a whole file of witty comments my husband Olof has made over the years. Another recent column was about my skills as a documenter of such comments.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the interests of transparency, I will confess that my sons consider my formerly 67-now-36 albums of family photos to be hoarding. I myself think of photos as \u201cartistic curation.\u201d<\/p>\n
The kids had long been threatening to cremate me after my untimely death with the photo albums that I had amassed over the years. It would be a two-fer; get rid of Mom and the albums all at once.<\/p>\n
But at least my \u201choard\u201d was confined to one (very large) bookcase. OK, and seven file cabinets.<\/p>\n
So maybe there\u2019s some of that hoarder gene in me too. I may have to cop to being a file hoarder. And those 36 photo albums don\u2019t count the 2,000-plus digital images on my computer.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Like me, my sibs are specialist hoarders. My (late) sister hoarded books. As in three deep on the book cases that covered every available bit of wall space. The person who bought her home after she passed away was probably thrilled to find that the home actually came with a fireplace which was not at all apparent.<\/p>\n
My engineer brother boards electronics.\u00a0 Lots and lots of electronics. He built many of them himself. But do not even think of staying at his four-bedroom home because three of those bedrooms are occupied by things with blinky lights.<\/p>\n
The cousins, however, are equal opportunity hoarders. Freelancers, if you will. Their houses could probably qualify for one of those hoarder TV shows. One of my cousins says that he is paying more than $8,000 a year in off-site hoarding, er, storage since their home is at capacity.<\/p>\n
For me, it helps that we don\u2019t have a garage (it was converted in one of the most ill-considered remodels in the history of remodels long before we bought the house). No attic or basement either, and only tiny 1947 closets back when people apparently only owned three sets of clothing. But it does keep one from over-accumulating. We have a hard-core rule that if we buy something, we give something else away.\u00a0<\/p>\n
One of my motivations for dealing with both the filing cabinets and photo albums is that on two occasions in my life, I have been tasked with cleaning out the home of a hoarder relative.\u00a0<\/p>\n
One of them was my aunt\u2019s home in Hard-To-Get-There Ohio. We filled up a 35-foot dumpster the first day. My aunt (never married, no kids) literally had magazines dating back to the late 1800s. And yes, the infinitely-hoardable National Geographics. (Why, why, why do people never throw away National Geographics???)\u00a0 The house had been in our family since the 1860s. It\u2019s amazing how much stuff you can acquire in 150 years.<\/p>\n
The second house was fortunately local. For the record, most of the organizations that pick up donations will only take 25 boxes at a time. It took eight months of twice weekly pickups.<\/p>\n
So I really don\u2019t want to do this to my kids.<\/p>\n
A while back, the New York Times had an article about \u201cdeath cleaning,\u201d i.e., going through your possessions long before your demise so that your relatives are not burdened with the truly onerous task of separating the wheat from the trash. One of the subsequent Letters to the Editor really caught my eye.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The writer, after noting that she wasn\u2019t planning to spend a single moment of her precious time culling her abundance of possessions, including 15 years of New Yorker magazines (the evil twin of National Geographics) rationalized it like this:<\/p>\n
\u201cIsn\u2019t it enough,\u201d she queries, \u201cthat my children will receive whatever is left? Gosh, there\u2019s some pretty good stuff in that mess. And isn\u2019t it possible that inching their way through it will prove to be an interesting and rewarding treasure hunt? And won\u2019t this exercise tell them things about me that could not be learned any other way, adding mortar to their memory, and perhaps even their regard for me?\u201d<\/p>\n
Note to her kids:\u00a0 MOVE NOW AND LEAVE NO FORWARDING ADDRESS!<\/p>\n
Let me assure you, Letter Writer, their regard for you will be in the dumpster (along with most of your stuff) by the time they\u2019re done \u201cinching\u201d through your lifetime\u2019s collection of detritus.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cInteresting\u201d and \u201crewarding\u201d are not two adjectives I\u2019d ever use in cleaning out the home of a hoarder.\u00a0 It\u2019s true that my aunt\u2019s house in Ohio produced some wonderful treasures, like stereopticons, gorgeous oil lamps, and some ornate ewers \u2013 intermixed, alas, with multiple cases of 40-year-old Jell-O, cartons of ratty underwear preserved in 1952 newspaper (she was a child of the Depression), and a huge freezer that was a veritable biohazard (I remember showing my hoarder cousin a freezer container labeled \u201craspberries, 1968.\u201d It was 2004. She said, \u201cMaybe they\u2019re still good?\u201d).<\/p>\n
So, please. Do not do this to your poor children!\u00a0 For every \u201ctreasure\u201d they might find after your demise, there will be 200 moments of fervent praying, \u201cPlease don\u2019t let this be hereditary.\u201d<\/p>\n
And now a hot tip: My dear friend Eleanor maintains that she found a cure for her husband\u2019s hoarding. \u201cI put my husband\u2019s stuff that he wouldn\u2019t get rid of in storage, then stopped paying the bill after three months.\u201d This is brilliant in its simplicity.<\/p>\n
But in the meantime: only three more filing cabinets to go.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I\u2019ve always prided myself that I am the only one in my generation on my mother\u2019s side of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":395688,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[11705,7,930,5184,6804,74,84,76,75],"class_list":["post-395687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-bird-rock","tag-california","tag-la-jolla","tag-la-jolla-light","tag-la-jolla-light-news","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-county","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=395687"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395687\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/395688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=395687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=395687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=395687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}