I just got back from staying with my friend’s mom–eldersitting, if you will–and I was stunned at the exponentially increasing amount of crap in their house. I did tell them ahead of time that I was willing to do some cleaning out and consolidating to help them out while I was there, and my pal joked that she’d have a nervous breakdown, but she was okay about it. Her mom thought it was great. Now, then…
They say they don’t have anything to eat, but the fridge and cupboards are full. I went through the fridge and tossed out about a hundred packets of condiments (they were old and leaking) just to make space for other stuff. I also went into friend’s bedroom and cleared a path to her bed, then cleared stuff off the bed so she can actually sleep in it. (She had been sleeping in her mom’s bed for some time.) I also moved her shoes from the hallway into her room. It’s not possible to shut any of the bedroom doors because her clothes are hung over the tops of them. It is also impossible to vacuum anywhere because of all the stuff strewn or stacked up on the floors. You can just imagine the dust and cobwebs.
I managed to clear off some chairs in the living room and also make the walking path wider in there. I never did get to the patio, where the recyclables are piling up. I also culled several pounds of unused toiletries from the spare room (loaded with enough old clothes to open up a shop) so a family member can donate them. There are bits of mail, notes, and documents everywhere, some of them probably important.
This has been going on for some years but ,as I said, it is getting worse every week. My friend says she has no time to clean up, but that’s because she finds all kinds of other activities to do. Her mom is too elderly and frail to do it. They were grateful for the assistance, but some mutual friends and I think that we would have to work for months as a team to really ream the place out.
The stuff in question is not just useful stuff; it’s also old documents, old envelopes, old containers, etc. that are no longer of any use. My pal hates to throw anything out because she thinks that someday she’ll need it. I figure she has some kind of disorder, but I’m sure she’d say that she “doesn’t have time” to see anyone about it.
So there it is. This post is about as long as the stacks are high.
Any thoughts?
She sounds like a hoarder–a particularly hard to treat manifestation of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. She very well is having a “nervous breakdown” over the stuff you got rid of, and may even retrieve it from the trash.
Of course, she could just be hopelessly disorganized, but the fact she wasn’t sleeping in her own bed because it was piled with stuff suggests a hoarding disorder to me.
I’m a bad clutterer, but at least I can sleep in my own bed. Poor soul.
I’ve known two people who were evicted from their apartments due to such clutter. Both suffered from and were being treated for depression, so it may be depression-related. (IANAPsychologist.) My husband and I got the “fun” job of helping both of them clean their places out in order to move–in the same summer! (We were only there, in both cases, to “help with heavy stuff”. Each of them had assured us that they would be fully packed on moving day. We had no idea what we were facing until we showed up.)
I bet those recyclables are piling up on the patio because your friend intends to try to sell them and make some money rather than giving them away to the curbside recycling people for free, right? Yep, all that stuff is “worth something.” One of my friends even wanted to move them with her until we convinced her that there was no room in the truck. It’s thriftiness taken to the ultimate extreme.
I don’t know what to tell you. For each of them, it took the wake-up call of being asked to leave (and actually, for that day itself to come) in order for them to finally even begin to deal with that junk. In both cases, I ended up packing in boxes a lot of what I myself would have thrown away–some of it was important, and there was just no time to sort at that late date.
There is hope. One of those friends had to move in with her other friend, and most of her boxes sat in his basement for about two years. This summer, she got herself together enough to get her own place, and she was able to sort through those boxes and throw most of it away. She even had a garage sale. She’s also been in therapy all this time.