Detective of the Deceased

I pulled at, ripped down, the "POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS" yellow caution tape crisscrossing the front door of the house I had just inherited with my three other siblings. I knew this house.

This three-bedroom home, a prototypical suburban family dwelling of the 1950s, was where my Uncle Mike (my father's brother), Aunt Marie and their sons Peter and Bob, my first cousins, had lived in New Jersey. Now they were all deceased — Bob having been the last to go, at age 67 — making my siblings and me his next of kin.

The police had tacked the brazen yellow banner from one side of the doorframe to the other, draped it over the concrete front steps, left it behind to close off the house after Bob had been found alone and lifeless. A friend discovered him slumped beside his favorite chair just inside the front door.

The police came, took his body to the Medical Examiner. The "DO NOT CROSS" tape was a cautionary warning. I should have given it some thought, but I didn't. I knew this house.

Together with my sister, I took the key we had just retrieved from the Cherry Hill Police Department, slid it into the front door lock. The key turned easily, as if it had been releasing the door every day, rather than what it had been doing, hibernating in the police station.

The unlocking complete, the door still did not want to let us in. With will and force we cracked the door open but piles of boxes and unidentifiable objects blocked us. The farthest I could enter was a distance about the length of my feet. No furniture was visible in what had once been a welcoming living room.

Suddenly, I did not know this house.

My senses of sight and smell were under assault. What reached me first was the odor, which momentarily made me lose my balance. I had been overtaken by this stench before. The day after the Twin Towers burned and collapsed into rubble in 2001, a North wind blew and the smell of the tragedy reached my neighborhood a mile north, in Greenwich Village.

Then, I inhaled the putrid air from burnt steel, cement, glass, plastic, wood, electrical wiring, fabric, cardboard, paper and lives lost, when I made the mistake of going outside. Now, this doorway had transformed into a portal of memory as the rank odor from within wafted over me, a stomach-turning smell of death, stagnation and, since Bob was a smoker, the strong scent of fire, of burning.

I was breathing in the past while breathing in the present, so it took me a long moment until what was before me came into focus. My eyes darted around what memory told me was a warm, inviting home with valuable antiques and paintings that I admired.

I tried to understand what I saw: heaps of aged magazines, electronics, papers, cleaning supplies, cigarette butts, cracker boxes, newly purchased Christmas decorations, old cardboard packing boxes of unknown content, plastic bags, kitchen appliances — tossed-aside refuse from wall to wall, floor to near the ceiling, without a break.

High up in the center of it all, a small plastic Christmas tree with mini-lights and a tiny angel on top. The cheeriness of the little holiday tree only added to my sense of confusion.

The real and the surreal were busily weaving together. I was in the home of my relatives, but yet this was not the home of my relatives. This disaster of a house was a world away from the people I had visited, the people connected to me. But then, were they the people they seemed to be?

My uncle, the charming representative of the Educational Testing Service? My aunt, the careful collector of vintage jewelry? My cousin the musician, and his brother the computer technician? The room held mystery mixed with sadness.

The collapsing stacks of newspapers and magazines and unsteady towers of old packing boxes, the thin gray coat of ash over every surface, all this spoke of a forsakenness, a giving up by those who lived in this house.

Perhaps somewhere underneath the piles, the living room furniture of my memory existed, but I had no way of knowing whether I would find what used to be, at least not yet.

I braved obstacles I had yet to identify in the living room, carved out my own trail through the many wall-to-wall, floor to ceiling, piles of boxes and bags that overflowed into the dining room, and the kitchen, and downstairs to the basement.

Upstairs rooms were also difficult to enter. Cardboard boxes and books and toys and general detritus blocked the ways to three bedrooms, two baths and the attic. I was standing in a secret, a house of a hoarder or perhaps, hoarders.

Everyone who had lived in this house survived into older age and according to the International OCD Foundation, hoarding symptoms appear to be almost three times more common in older adults (ages 55 to 94) than younger adults (ages 34 to 44).

It occurred to me that this conglomeration of messy garbage mixed in with recognizable items like crystal bowls, a Russian samovar, a three-tiered brass server, white Limoges candleholders, a decades-old white Kitchen Aid mixer — all these objects, valuable or not, had become a fortress of remembrances, preserving the people who were once alive within the walls.

Items of the present, like DVDs and VHS tapes, flashlights, batteries and even plastic bags, were my cousin's companions, but they were far outnumbered by the used and cherished objects of the past.

Standing in the master bedroom, facing a collection of about 20 vintage Nutcracker dolls I began to feel the pull, the emotional hold of possessions that have been touched and loved by someone I have touched and loved. These inanimate objects came alive and, feeling the spirit of their owners, I could see how throwing them out would be an extinction that my cousin Bob had refused to undertake.

My brothers, younger and less connected to family history, wanted to rent dumpsters, clean out the house, and put it on the market without further ado. My sister and I needed time to assess everything that was alive to us: dozens of glass paperweights that had belonged to cousin Peter, watches collected by Uncle Mike, Asian ceramics hidden behind papered glass hutch doors by Aunt Marie, Bob's abstract paintings and many more awakened objects rose from surrounding refuse.

Psychologists who study why certain people hoard have linked the behavior to mental trauma and the need to create comfort and security. Amassed objects form barricades of safety, protection from unseen forces. What I saw in the house of a hoarder — a hoarder genetically related to me, knowing as I do that science recently revealed a genetic component to hoarding — initially repulsed, as well as frightened me.

What if I had this gene? As I threaded my way through the house of objects, however, I experienced connections to items of glass and wood and paper and metal, and my repulsion and fear reconfigured, evolving into empathy.

Tearing down that police tape and opening that front door meant opening my mind to the realization that my relatives formed deep attachments to various objects, and that those objects held personal histories. For these, I could hear Bob say to me, "The dumpster is not an option."

I became a detective of the deceased and listened as they spoke to me through their possessions. Toy soldiers gave me insight into Bob's imagination. An accordion told the early story of Peter's career as a pianist and organist. In the boxed Tupperware containers I saw my aunt's effort to earn her own money and gain a woman's independence.

The saved greeting cards, however, revealed a lack of demonstrative love. Anniversary cards to Marie were simply signed "Mike" without an expression of affection included. My cousins' Mother's and Father's Day greetings to their parents were signed the same way, names only, no love mentioned.

It took almost a year to empty and sell the house. Hired hoarder housecleaners helped us fill six 30-cubic-yard dumpsters. We donated items to organizations, auctioned others, kept some.

As we closed the front door for the last time, I no longer questioned how the hoarding began. For each person who had lived in this house, objects offered consolation that my relatives did not offer each other.

That little Christmas tree with the tiny angel on top now sits on my bookcase and speaks for my family's lost souls, as well as the upwards of 14 million Americans, at last count, who hoard and are likely living alone.