Your House Is On Fire

No, not an actual physical fire.  But a psychological one – maybe metaphysical.  Not one that can be put out by water or foam.  Still – a fire of epic proportions.

“Your house is on fire, friend.  You can only keep what you really need.”  That is what David told her, our friend, when we finally got there.  To her apartment.  The apartment we knew, yet somehow knew not at all.

We had been in the apartment many times over the years.  She is a family friend.  She became a citizen with the assistance of our family.  She reveres our family – keeps photos displayed in prominent places.  When our matriarch and patriarch died, we became her family.  We seem to be her only real friends.  She has acquaintances – people she waits in line with in the early morning to get gifts of food from the local church or mosque, people who live in her building.  But her walls are so thick – her guard up so strong – that one wrong move (so often unintended) cuts people out of her life forever.  From what we know, we are the only steady friends she has. 

So when the emergency hit, she called us.  “I have a problem.  It is an emergency” she said in her thick accent.  Yes, friend, this is an EMERGENCY.  She was being evicted from her apartment.

I have wondered how her apartment situation worked.  I knew she got government assistance to help pay the rent.  I knew there were sometimes inspections from the housing authority.  What I did NOT know was that she had been cited for hoarding before and had not told us.  And that she had recently gotten in big trouble again and they were now “Going to change the locks and not let me back in” as she reported to us.  She gave us names and numbers of 2 people involved in the case and we assured her we would help.  And we pulled over onto the side of the road in Yellowstone National Park (all of the way across the country…) and started the journey.

The first call was to Kimberly, who it turned out works for Adult Protective Services.  I found it extremely embarrassing that Adult Protective Services had been called in for our friend!  She was our FRIEND – weren’t we supposed to protect her?  Kimberly was very, very kind and explained the situation to us.  Yes – our friend would be evicted.  No – this was not her first warning, by far…  We explained that we had not KNOWN, honestly did not KNOW, that she was a hoarder.  Over the years we have been to the apartment, we were polite.  She loved for us to come visit, but we stayed only in the first room you entered, the living room.  The tv almost always blared in the background (Spanish novellas or Spanish game shows…) but we just talked louder to hear one another.  Sure, there was a room partition put up on the other side of the living room, but we had never peeked behind it.  Why would we?  We were not invited there. 

We had never gone down the hallway.  Never entered her bedroom.  I am not even sure if we had ever used the bathroom…  We had poked our heads in the kitchen when our friend would go in there to put us a piece of cake on a plate, but more often than not if she knew we were coming, the food always on offer would already be brought to the living room before we arrived.

We told Kimberly we would help our friend.  We HAD to!  We were the only people who could and we could not let her get thrown out onto the street.  But we were thousands of miles away on vacation, and her eviction was set to happen before we even got HOME.  We would help but we needed time.  Kimberly said if we believed we could get it all cleaned out enough, she would get us time.  She got the inspection put off one week and we continued into Yellowstone… 

During our vacation we would call our friend and check in.  Lack of a common language makes serious conversations difficult, but we tried repeatedly to get some points across:  this is serious; we will help; you must start NOW; do you have money to rent a storage unit?; put things in bags…  “My knees hurt.  My back hurts.  Where will I PUT it?  I cannot carry the bags down the stairs…”.  She did not whine – but she obviously felt the overwhelming doom and did not know what to do.  Much like writing a story when the paper is blank – where do you start when the possibilities and the task appear never ending? 

We got home around 1 am.  The next morning it was clear vacation had ended when we got up early and drove the few miles to her apartment.  It was time to see behind the dividing screen.

Do you laugh or do you cry?  Bags and bags and bags.  Boxes.  All full.  The bed wedged in on every side by junk.  One whole wall of the bedroom covered in stacks of bags.  A suitcase thrown in here and there…  A wheelchair.  An exercise ball in the tub – along with a host of other odds and ends.  Milk bottles and OJ containers filled with water all around the place.  AN APARTMENT FULL OF SHIT. 

I had not anticipated how invasive it would feel.  How intrusive my actions would be.  I could not do this FOR HER.  I could not make decisions about what to throw away.  These were not my things…  So my instinct was to open a bag and present her with the contents.  “Here friend – you go through this pile of clothes.  Make 3 piles for me – one to keep, one to donate, one to throw away.” 

After using that technique for about half an hour, David delivered his “fire” line.  It had become clear very quickly that having her look at, touch, and sort each item was a ridiculous fantasy and would never work.  No – her house was on FIRE.  She could only keep the essentials.

My new system was to sit her in a chair and bring one bag to her to sort.  The idea was two-fold – give her some sense of ownership and let her decide, and distract her while we went through big piles.  It was obvious to us (as outside eyes) that almost everything was junk.  She doesn’t have money, where would she have even gotten all of that crap?  I suspect some of it was given to her, some found, and the rest purchased at thrift shops. 

Her sorting led to a BIG pile of clothes to KEEP and a much smaller pile to donate.  The “throw away” pile was nearly non-existent.  I respected her decisions and the “keep” pile grew as the night went on…  Sometimes the items that made the cut to keep puzzled me.  I watched as she pulled a black piece of old stretchy cloth from a bag.  She held it up and looked at it from several angles trying to figure out what it was.  I could see when a light when off in her mind and she identified it, but I still had no clue what it was.  So when she moved it to the precious “keep” pile I asked “What IS that?”  “Exercise!!!” she answered.  A LEOTARD.  An old, nylon (with runs) leotard bought at some thrift shop.  Far too small for her.  Let’s get this straight – she does not EXERCISE.  She has bad knees, a sore back, she is round…  Even if she could squeeze into the leotard, she was not showing up at any Jazzercize classes soon.  Yeah – so keep it is…

Tapes were everywhere….  Mostly cassette tapes, but also a couple 8 tracks and even some reel to reels.  I had noticed them in the living room bookshelf when we would visit, but now I realized that they were literally all over the apartment.  Almost none of them were labeled.  They were homemade tapes.  I brought some to her and asked her “keep or throw” and she quickly took them from me.  “Keep!  Keep!!”.  Obviously they were important to her, so as the cleaning went on the pile of tapes grew and grew.  I decided she would keep them all.  I would find a way for her precious tapes (whatever is on them) to stay with her.  I told David, “We will never know what is on any of these tapes until she dies probably”. 

David was more brutal than I.  He, probably wisely, felt the need to just start carrying out bags and boxes unopened and put them in the dumpster.  We are lucky she lives in a big complex and there were dumpsters we could fill!  So she and I made piles, David took things out.  For around 4 hours, until we had to rush home to shower and get to an appointment. 

Our next visit over was less dramatic in that we knew what to expect, but no less stupefying for her.  When we came in this time she said, “Do not ask me.  YOU do.  You do.”.  I knew she was right – asking her to decide was not only time consuming but so difficult for her.  To see each item – touch it – think – and DECIDE had to be heartbreaking.

But I did not want the responsibility of DECIDING!  What if I made a wrong call?  What if I threw away something that was precious to her? 

We put her on “box” duty – as I emptied a box I would bring it to her and she would cut it up for recycling.  This kept her busy with a genuine task and from having to make hard decisions.  She ended up cutting her finger and having to bandage it up, and shortly after that David cut HIS finger on a broken mirror he was carrying out.  Injury plagued job.

I focused on the bedroom.  I had decided this apartment was not only going to pass inspection – it would wow the inspectors.  They would be PROUD of how it looked – proud of our friend (and, I guess, of us).  David worked on carrying down boxes and boxes and bags and bags.  Some went in our car for donating to Goodwill, most went in the dumpsters. 

I found a lot of little bits of jewelry and showed her.  She said I could throw them away – none of them were good.  But many were brand new.  I think she bought them off of TV…  It broke my heart to throw them away, so I put all the pieces I found in one box.  Those necklaces are sure to be a tangled mess now, but I refused to decide keep or throw! 

In the midst of my sorting, she would periodically come into the bedroom, often to tell me something I should be on the lookout for.  I had thrown away loads of papers when she came in and announced her passport was “missing” and somewhere in the apartment.  Oh. 

I found a strange metal object that I couldn’t identify.  I took it to her to ask – it was from “her country” – something they used for mail…  I knew she had not been home in decades.  This was a piece of her history.  She thought a bit and then said we could throw it away.  It was sad for me.  Those are the types of things I cherish in my life and I did not want her to have to part with it.  “But the house is on fire, Susan” I reminded myself as I tossed it in the trash bag to go out.

I finally moved enough bags and bits that I could make it to a closet.  I am sure she had not opened that closet in years.  When I opened it, it was filled with, oh yes, MORE BAGS.  Some clothes were hanging in the closet, but mostly it was crammed with garbage bags full of clothes, towels, sheets, tablecloths….  She does not have a TABLE to put a cloth on….  More suitcases (she does not travel). 

Bit by bit I moved them out.  I sat on the floor and pulled and pulled – going through the contents of the bags and sorting.  But the “keep” pile of clothing from the day before held far more clothes than would fit in the 2 closets, so as the night wore on I was less vigilant about opening bags I knew contained only clothes.  Why sort them if she couldn’t keep any anyway? 

Then, shit got real.

Without looking, I reached around the corner into the dark closet to pull out my next bag.  Instead my hand hit a shoe box.  The lid came off and my hand went inside the box.  FUR.  I quickly pulled the box out and could see the body of a DEAD MOUSE.  I closed the box.  I am surprised I didn’t scream.  I washed my hands.  And I waited for David to come into the bedroom.

I wanted to run into the living room squealing and fling the offensive box at him, but more than that I wanted to preserve whatever dignity our friend had left.  It was bad enough we were seeing every single item she owned, things she obviously had never intended anyone to see. 

Eventually David came in while I was working on something else and I showed him.  We decided our friend did need to see the mouse.  We thought it would help her understand the severity of the problem.  She basically just said she wondered how it got in there…  Guess it was not as big a deal to her. 

Medicine was a common theme.  Pill bottles were everywhere – some empty, some full.  Some in Ziploc bags, some in boxes.  Pills, pills, pills.  We explained she should only keep bottles WITH pills and only ones that were not EXPIRED.  She wasn’t thrilled, and I let her keep one precious prescription that was expired, but for the most part we cleaned that “pharmacy” up.

We found not one but two sewing machines.  Years ago she did alterations for a fancy store (I found much evidence of that, too – lots of the ends of pants that had been cut off, ties, assorted fabric bits, and a biiig bag of tags she must have sewn into the garments after she altered them.  Keep in mind – this job was a long ago – and the crap from it still filled her apartment).  Anyway, she does not sew anymore, but sewing was a big part of her life.  We couldn’t make her give up both machines, yet we had to make her part with one.  She had a tough time choosing, but her newer one ended up in the donate pile and she kept her old one. 

Little pieces of paper with handwritten notes were everywhere.  Most were in Spanish, some had English translations written on them and were obviously for her to practice phrases.  Hand written recipes.  Notes about doctor’s appointments.  And stacks and stacks and stacks of old mail.  Not letters from friends but JUNK MAIL.  Everywhere.  Oh – and magazines.  And catalogs.  Oh my.   I kept every photo I found and put them all together.  I could NOT let photos get pitched.  I am sure some did (without my knowing) in the stacks of mail and papers that got thrown away.  But every photo I saw, I saved.  We bought plastic bins and labeled them in Spanish (for her) and English (for us) and explained she could keep as many “toiletries” as fit in that box, as many “tools” as  fit in that box…

We kept going.  She kept going.  We worked many hours.  I left town for work and she and David KEPT AT IT.  Hell, David stayed so late one night his car was being towed and he had to run the tow truck driver down and pay him $50 to take the car off and leave it!!  They worked until moments before the Adult Protective Services lady, an interpreter, and the housing inspector came for a “pre-inspection” (which we had requested so we would know what, if anything, was not yet up to par).

They were IMPRESSED.  Delighted.  And, dare I say, PROUD of our friend and her apartment!  SHE PASSED and didn’t even need another full inspection!

Since that day, we have all met again with Kimberly from Adult Protective Services and an interpreter.  We have begun the process of getting our friend to write a will, get an advance directive completed, and give us power of attorney should she need our help in the future to make decisions.  We have cleaned out her hastily rented storage unit, which was crammed from top to bottom with what felt like another apartment full of bags and boxes.

And I have thought.  YOUR HOUSE IS ON FIRE.

What do you save?  What do you choose? 

I do not know if I understood the concept of privilege before this experience.  I hear the term thrown about as a buzz word, but it did not resonate with me.  Now I get it.  I have privilege.  If I were in her shoes, I may have been in the same boat.

But no – I am “lucky”.  I have a big house which I own, so no inspector will knock on my door and have the right to snoop around in all my dark corners.  No one will call Adult Protective Services and say that I may be a danger to myself or others near me.  My collections will keep growing – clothes I have not worn for years, hotel soaps I plan to give away, tea pots that sit out to look pretty and rarely are used.  I may not have piles and bags, but I do have boxes.  Boxes full of crap stored down in my basement.  And don’t you, too?  But aren’t you “lucky” to have a basement to squirrel them away in? 

So for now, our hotdog Halloween costume from years ago lies downstairs.  Our blue plastic mermaid is on the mantel.  My far too many table cloths are packed away in a spare room. 

And the little brass cowboy – the oddity our friend unexplainably thought to give us from the piles and piles in her apartment - sits on our window sill.  And I slipped one of her many handwritten notes into my pocket – that will be framed and put on our wall as a reminder.

 

Brass Cowboy (soup can for scale)

But if my house was on fire.  If my house was on fire…