You died over a year ago. You left two flats full of clutter. It took nine months to clear them and we still have bags and boxes to sort through.
I’m not sure when and why you started hoarding. Everyone says you had a very good eye – for paintings, for objects, for fashion. Is there really a faulty gene that makes some people unable to decide all sorts of things in life, not least what to keep and what to throw away? Or does hoarding develop after loss? You kept your childhood close to you always, and I think your hoarding got worse after Mum and Dad died.
You had so many offers of help but you refused them all. Your condition got worse and worse. Gradually, fewer and fewer people were invited to the house. You were still sociable but you made a point of meeting friends in cafes or restaurants. Latterly there was no room for family members to stay with you.
So what did you keep? The short answer is: everything. What the family would most like you to have got rid of were the plastic and tinfoil food containers. We would have liked you to get rid of the piles of newspapers up to door-handle height and beyond, but you swore you were going to read them. We would have liked you to get rid of the half-finished jars and bottles of cream and lotions in the bathroom, but you were always keen on skincare. You just couldn’t find the pot you needed to finish before you bought a new one. I don’t think you gave a thought to what would happen after you died.
It’s been hard. The plastic and tinfoil we could recycle. But we couldn’t take a stash of newspapers to the recycling bins. Among the papers and even interleaved in some of them were important documents, so each had to be flicked through. We found 250 unused video tapes that can’t be recycled. We found half-written Christmas cards. We found presents that hadn’t been unwrapped. We found not only your job applications, school and university notes but also Dad’s university notes from the 1930s.
Significantly, though, we found letters. Piles of letters from Mum, from us – your sisters and brother. We wrote every week during the 70s when we’d all left home. From Mum the local gossip, cuttings of engagement announcements, news of every other member of the family. You didn’t write your memoirs but the letters will certainly help me write mine.
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