Intervention

For the last several hours my sisters and I have been going through my mother's things and throwing them away or bagging them up to be given away to Goodwill.

All of my life, my mother has been a packrat. My father, during the time they lived together, only enabled this tendency in her with his own hoarding instincts. As my mother's emotional and psychological disenfranchisement became more pronounced, so did her penchant for clutter.

I used to say "my mom has a lot of stuff, but she is very clean." And then one day, a few years ago, I realized that her "clutter" precluded cleanliness because it is impossible to clean when there is literally no clear surface in a house.

We have not been able to sit at the dining room table in at least five years. There is trash underneath it. There are piles of knick knacks, papers, and "decorations" on top of it.
My mother had begun to store wrapping paper, all manner of baskets, trinkets, and just plain crap in the shower of her second bathroom.

She's been begging me for months to come home and help her clean, and for as much as I've wanted to, I know that her take on "cleaning" is to separate her clutter into piles--to "organize" the mess--to migrate it to a new corner. I told her that if I came home, it would not be to help her clean, but to help her throw things away. My mother is a good month of continued purging away from cleaning up.

Among the things I found today:

Several bags of bags
Natty hair pieces/wig attachments
Colouring books
A book that explains menstruation to teens (written in the 1960s if the illustrations are anything to go by)
Hair conditioner that I am certain was in the main bathroom when I was in high school (1987-1991)

She has been fighting us at every turn. The only peaceful moments we've had are the ones when she went out to run errands. The push/pull between wanting to respect her and let her make decisions about what to throw away and what to keep is butting up against the cruel necessity of simply putting things in garbage bags without telling her anything.

And what is worse, her car has become an extension of the house. When she picked me and Caryl up at the train station last night, there was not enough room in the car for us both because of all the junk she carts around purposelessly day in and day out.

It's heartbreaking.

My middle sister gave voice to my darkest thoughts. How hard, she wondered, would this be if we had to dig through all this stuff after our mother's passing (which is not something we foresee in the immediate future, but still is an inevitability)?