Category: Mental Health

“Should we donate all of dad’s suits,” my mother asks on Facebook. It’s a simple question, but it strikes a nerve. Dad died two years ago. Hoarder mom is trying to work with a friend to go through all of the items in her northeast home virtually, as she’s stuck in her “snowbird” Florida condo all summer due to the risk of traveling in a pandemic. My mother, who yesterday had a 5 minute argument over whether or not to throw out an empty bottle of eyeglass solution, had no inkling of concern about getting rid of all of my father’s suits. Which, at surface level, is the right way to act about suits (and empty eyeglass solution bottles.) But my parent’s traumatic relationship, lack of empathy, years of domestic violence and pain just sit heavy with me. I know I need to let it all go, but I’m stuck. And like my mom’s 5 minute argument about whether to keep the empty bottle, I posed the question — should we keep one of the suits?

I asked my mom — what was his best suit? Can we keep the one he wore to my wedding?

“That was the one he was buried in.”

“Oh,” I responded. I’m pretty sure I knew that but I forgot in the way I forgot everything about his death because it was all too painful. I immediately experienced a flashback to seeing his corpse at the funeral–even though Jews aren’t supposed to see the body at funerals–because my non Jewish aunt convinced my mother that one should put something important in the coffin before he is buried and I was curious and had never seen a dead person and felt like maybe it would provide me closure or something or I don’t know and Catholics do it all the time so what harm could there be, so I brought my week-old son’s little frog cap and put it on his shoulder and looked at him for a second as the funeral home filled up with my father’s friends and family and acquaintances and I didn’t know whether to let my gaze linger for as long as possible — the last time I’d see my father ever — or to look away, knowing that the image would forever be burned into my mind anyway, and it wasn’t like he was about to move to change the scene…

Death of a parent is hard for everyone. It is especially hard growing up in a home where things that didn’t matter were clutched on to with such passion — a parent who cares more about the loss of an empty glasses cleaning container than the loss of a life, or the feelings of a daughter. My mother has been through a lot, and much of her lack of empathy I think is in response to all of it. A defense mechanism. I didn’t know her when she was young. Maybe she was different then. It’s hard to say. My father too. He had hopes and dreams once. He was always cynical and fact-driven and probably thought he was right in 100% of the arguments he was having even as a young child, but maybe once upon a time he wasn’t so bitter and angry. Apart, they cared mostly about themselves and had the ability to lead reasonably happy lives. Together, it was fuel on fire. Daily.

So you’d think I would want to get rid of my childhood home–a home that stores all of those memories. A home I haven’t lived in now for nearly 20 years, despite visiting often. It’s time to let her go. Yet just like my parents, I find myself more attached to the physical object that is the home and furniture in it than people. My childhood home is a person, with her own feelings and needs and wishes. My home was what comforted me and hugged me on all those long days and nights when I felt otherwise alone. Nothing was stable in my life except those walls. While the house has gone through some updates since I lived there, my own childhood bedroom is largely the same. The same lilac and off white wallpaper I picked out when I was seven, although now ripped in spots. The same Ethan Allen furniture my father purchased for a seven year old that the seven year old quickly destroyed (and I never heard the end of that.) The same view out the window of a huge verdant backyard and thousands of tall trees that would sway violently in summer storms. The power line that swooped elegantly across the backyard close to the trees, the temporary home to many birds who stopped by to visit. And stumps where other trees — like the tall pine trees and apple trees were slaughtered.

A house is just a house. And I can’t get back to the house now for who knows how long. It will likely be sold before I can. I’m not sure if going back to say goodbye would help at this point. In the same way I saw my father in a bad state in June and a slight recovery before I had to catch my flight back to California, only to find out his passed in August, so too may be my final goodbye with my home. I at least got to spend many years going back to visit it. I even had my son back once to run around, though he won’t remember that. I had hoped for many years visiting with my children, trips to their grandparents on the east coast, the comfort of that home, the warmth of seeing my new family experience the best of the house.

My father at least would have see the value in that. He cared about that house too. He put more money into it than one ever should have, in buying very nice furniture and adding on a family room and fixing up the bathrooms in ways that made little sense for resale value but met his own unique aesthetic taste. My mother has no attachment to the home, only the stuff in it. Only to empty eyeglass cleaning fluid bottle, and the papers upon papers that have been saved over the years — magazines and coupons and lose sheets where she jotted down notes. And hundreds of books and toys with missing pieces which she can’t bare to get rid of because she wants my children to have them. A hundred thousands pieces of my and my sister’s childhood mixed in with just about anything else you can think of – likely more empty glasses fluid containers.

I’d like to go back to the house once more to do a serious pass of my own stuff. Every time I went back I went through my things a bit, but never effectively. It was too much emotionally do deal with. I am a hoarder too, though I recognize it so try not to acquire a lot of things that I know will be hard to part with for no good reason. I buy makeup because I have no emotional attachment to it and it’s easy to get rid of. Clothes are harder, but I’m learning to become less emotionally attached to them. It helps that my life has no important events in it anymore, so I have few clothes that store memories in their threads, outside of what I wore when I gave birth to my son and my wedding dress, which after nearly 4 years I’ve failed to have cleaned and packed up appropriately.

For my own life, I am struggling because I do not have a home. I am looking to buy a home and the process is triggering due to what home means to me in the first place. Knowing the only home I’ve known as home is slowly dying. Looking around at my apartment and seeing not a home but a temporary place of shelter. Visiting potential homes to buy and thinking how we probably wouldn’t want to stay there forever, how they might be an acceptable starter home, but how long term, if financially possible, we’d want more space. So the home, even if we owned it, would also be temporary. Would it become too hard to let go? Or would it always feel temporary, like this apartment, and all the apartments I’ve lived in since I moved out of my home at 17? If my own home is sold and gone, maybe I could build a new home. Maybe the memories of the past would fade. Much like my father who I still remember very much alive, I’ll remember my house with her lilac wallpaper and the yard and the feeling of the wet grass under my feet and the dirt under my knees as I planted a dozen plants I purchased each year at the school plant sale despite being the world’s worst gardener. As long as I’m alive, those memories will never die.

And I know I need to let the house go. Much like my mom needs to let her random empty bottles of glasses cleaner that she might one day use to pour fluid from bigger bottles into go. I realize, intellectually, life isn’t about things, but about experiences, about moments, about what happens in any given day. I don’t need to be in a house or touch an old suit to make those memories any more valid. And there are some things in my life I’d probably be better off forgetting. Starting over. But it’s scary and sad and despite being 36 I don’t feel any more ready to let any of it go. I know soon I won’t have a choice. The only choice I have is in my own life. In the home I make for my family. In the decisions I make every day. My childhood is over. It’s long over. And, even if my mother cannot let the things in the house go, I need to break free of that house that provides a false sense of security. Nothing is every truly owned. Not even a house. The land is rented. It was never ours. The only thing that is ours is what we choose to remember.