My Father, the Hoarder

The surefire way to diagnose a hoarder: try to take their toys away.

You never realize how bad it is until you see it through someone else’s eyes. I’d just invited a friend to stay in one of our spare rooms — “spare” being a generous term here, as it was packed halfway to the ceiling with boxes. My parents are almost-empty-nesters, with me, graduated but living at home, and the two spare rooms once devoted to my two siblings had become glorified storage rooms.

It wouldn’t be so bad if the things in storage were, you know, childhood memories, or things my parents were in the process of sorting through. Things with some ultimate destination and purpose that were surely not meant for the limbo/hell of an old bedroom. I wiggled my way through the clutter of boxes to the window where I carefully drew up the blinds, demonstrating that they could be used, that at least one thing in this room was functional, before shimmying back to the doorway. Jesus, I thought, Let’s hope nothing in here catches fire.

After a horrible lucid moment in which I realized that yes, I would be entirely at fault for housing a person in an fire-hazard-filled room, I was struck with a profound sense of disgust.

The boxes were filled with outdated electronics — one of my father’s main categories of collectible things — and my friend barely had space to lay his suitcase on the floor. A sizable chunk of the room was occupied by a stationary workout bike and a rowing machine, the latter of which had never been used. And after my friend left and I began to sift through the boxes myself, I discovered the full extent this obsession.

Some of it was entertaining. Among the things I found were relics of a bygone age of computer science — installation discs for Windows 95, books and CDs on how to use the exciting new “World Wide Web,” floppy discs, the 1996 original Tomb Raider game (though unfortunately scratched beyond use)— things that even evoked a pang of nostalgia for me, a 90's child. But in looking through the rest, my heart began to fall, and I started to realize that whatever this was, it wasn’t okay.

There were unopened packages of electronics he’d purchased over the course of ten years, their function now outdated, some ordered in absurd quantities for some unknown but clearly vast number of people whom I wasn’t sure existed. There were cables — innumerable cables — made for hardware that was no longer in circulation, but that had been meticulously organized and wrapped in rubber bands and bread bag ties for some future date when they would *surely* be useful again. There were plastic bags filled with old batteries, the fluid leaking out into the boxes, and headphones that had grown mold on the soft ear pieces, which disintegrated at my touch. I cut my hands on scraps of computer motherboards mixed haphazardly into the boxes, the contents of which my father speculatively guessed at later, and then decided that they were definitely worth keeping. There were keyboards too big and clunky for any self-respecting, modern person, and roughly 10 lbs. of CDs for programs which would no longer run on any currently existing operating system.

I was somewhere between sadness, frustration, and secondhand embarrassment when I decided to do the one thing every psychologist warns you not to do with a hoarder: I started throwing his things out.

Granted, at the time I didn’t really know that he was a hoarder; that is, I didn’t know if he had any kind of emotional attachment to these things. In some wild delusion, I thought that he might even thank me for getting around to a task that he didn’t have the time to do. Using my best judgment, I began sorting his things, and I wound up taking two full boxes of old TV cables — just TV cables — to the nearest E-recycling place. Two, because some part of me wanted to do this in secret, little by little. Even though I had rationalized that he would be thankful, the intuitive side of me knew that he wouldn’t.

When he found out, any hope I had was dispelled. He flew into a rage, digging through the boxes, demanding to know what had been taken — “Old TV cables,” I said — “Well, how do you know we won’t use them again?!” — “Because no TV uses those cables anymore.” My mother and I watched as he vacillated between “Screw it, they’re gone,” and “What recycling place did you take them to?”: a question I refused to answer. Finally, after he had settled down, he said that he wasn’t against the idea of cleaning, but everything had to be approved by him. All right, we agreed, and I started sorting again.

We soon realized that his approval meant very little. Out of a full box I had compiled, he emptied it until only the barest layer of scraps lay on the bottom, moving the rest into a “to keep” box. We watched as he went through every item by hand, his face lighting up at each one. He would ask, “Do you know what this is? Do you know what this does?” in excitement, like a child, and each time my mother and I exchanged hopeless glances. He showed us three circa 2005 Bluetooth earpieces and told me that I should use them, to which I said I had no intention of doing so, and he placed them in the “to keep” box.

I’ll admit that maybe his collection had an audience somewhere — maybe some old tech nerds would find it just as exciting as he did, and maybe he’d part with it more easily if he knew it was going to someone appreciative. But my mother has fought back against his hoarding for close to 20 years to constant failure. Their two-car garage has housed zero cars for much of my conscious life, filled instead with piles of plywood, old and unusable bikes, surfboards (no one in our family surfs), punching bags (no one in our family punches), shelves of household chemicals far past their expiration date, dozens of paint cans that are entirely dried up, five (or more, I don’t know) toolboxes, and three large cabinets he recently constructed to sort and house more of his possessions. That’s the thing — every time we tell him he needs to clean, as in, get rid of it, he just creates more space in which to store it.

My mother has stopped trying to clean anything herself: she tried once to sort out the garage ten years ago, but due to the clutter, she tripped and split her forehead open on an uncovered saw. I went with her to the emergency room in terror: I couldn’t drive at the time, and I watched her from the passenger seat with my heart pounding as she carefully drove herself, a trail of blood dripping down over her eyes.

The argument that followed between her and my father changed nothing. The things kept accumulating.

We have enough shingles to roof at least three houses, enough wood to construct another house more — plastic plant pots in the hundreds, a rabbit hutch with no rabbits, and beehives with no bees. These are remnants of things that my father once showed interest in and may or may not have carried out to fruition. (We have never, nor will we ever, raise bees in our small suburban backyard.)

I managed to clean out the two rooms under more stress than I should have ever endured. Every decision I made was scrutinized, and I was accused more than once of being uncaring and reckless with my father’s belongings. “How would you like it if I threw away your laptop?!” he asked me once, to which I replied that I only had one, which I used every day, and the comparison wasn’t fair. He relented, and I was allowed to recycle three of his computers.

We reached a turning point when my father finally admitted that yes, he was a hoarder, and he acknowledged my intervention. I thank whatever channel hosts that voyeuristic show about hoarders because my father mentioned it and said that he didn’t want to be like those guys. He has adopted a kind of humorous attitude toward it, which I think is meant to mask a deep sense of loss he’s feeling as his electronics are whisked away to who knows where. To comfort him, I told him about how his two reel-to-reel projectors (never used) were quickly picked up by another hoarder at the recycling drop-off, and he was glad that someone appreciated them.

It’s difficult for me to sympathize with something that has continually inconvenienced the people in his life to the point of actual injury. Part of me also hates it because of how it intersects with an already-existing part of his personality: a blitheness towards how his actions affect others, not out of ill-intent but ignorance. Wi-Fi passwords are changed without warning, things are moved around, and he forgets to inform anyone who also inhabits the same house as he does. Sometimes it’s endearing, but sometimes I’m struck with something akin to jealousy — how stress-free would life be if you never had to consciously consider others? Everyone’s just caught in the wake of your whirlpool, and it’s their problem, not yours.

I know that hoarding isn’t a rational decision — he didn’t just sit down and decide that he wanted to turn our house into a junkyard — but that’s where we’re at now, and we’re slowly working to undo it. I watched a few episodes of Hoarders, and I recognize that my father isn’t an extreme case, which I’m grateful for, but still the same psychological problem is present here.

Growing up in a house of clutter has changed my brother and me. We’ve become aggressive minimalists, regularly throwing out, giving away, or outright abandoning our belongings when they reach some arbitrary threshold, showing little to no acknowledgement for what these items ever meant to us. We frequently run up against the wall of our parents, who insist that this or that holds “memories” — a conflict I know exists not just for the children of hoarders. But I’m tempted, any time I see that I have “too much” accumulating in my closet, to tear through it and free myself of my material belongings. I hate the idea of permanent ownership. I hate knowing that these items are my responsibility.

The garage is still unusable, the side yards piled with wood that remains dangerously flammable, and sheds and shelves and cabinets are constantly being built to store more, more, more. Every small inch of progress we make feels like it is roundly reversed every time my father announces he’s just ordered a cool new gadget in the mail, or that he’s been lucky enough to snatch up a friend’s old tools before they get thrown out. Areas that have once been cleaned are now slowly cluttering up again.

I’m trying to make peace with it. Sing kumbaya, live and let live, and allow my father to make his own decisions. The fear though, and it lurks at the back of my mind, is that once the house needs to be emptied (hopefully far in the future after I too have grown old)…it’s going to be a near impossible task. By acting now, I believe, I can make that future a little more manageable. But maybe it’s not my future to worry about. I’m unsure.

Whatever the case, I want my parents to be safe. No more saws to the forehead, no leaky batteries, no boxes upon boxes of electronics shoved into the small attic (a compromise we reached; they’re out of the way, but still, they are a hazard). I don’t want this to come down to a “told-you-so” moment, because are those moments ever anything but tragic? I don’t want to be right, but I want something to change.

In the midst of the popular mantra to de-clutter, de-stress, and de-toxify your life, I give you new age gurus a daunting project: my father. Let’s see if you can sort him out.