Penny, Part 1.

This is the one that haunts me.

Picture from one of our hoarder jobs.

My hands shook a bit as I nudged the heavy wood door open. Penny’s son warned me: His mother was a stage-five hoarder. She was also, clearly in a lifetime long ago, a former ballerina. The juxtaposition of those two things- graceful plies and garbage piles- had me crazy curious. The creepiness of venturing alone into an unoccupied hoarder house had me jumpy.

How does someone get to the point where living in garbage piles seems okay? What happened to her? Was it one big event, some horrific trauma? Or was like boiling the proverbial frog… then just one day the stash of trash reached maximum capacity and Penny* thought “Now what?”

I’d soon have even more questions and then, their terrible answers. Penny’s story kept me tossing, exhausted yet wired, in my bed at night. If Penny’s home was a movie, it would be Mean Girls, Home Edition: Pretty on the outside but ugly, in ways unimaginable to most, on the inside.

First, some background.

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Trimmed hedges and cheerful red geraniums lined the front of the brick Colonial. Hmmm… this tidiness doesn’t match up with what Penny’s son, Anthony, shared over the phone, I thought as I walked up to the front door. My fingers fumbled under the flower pot to the left and I extracted the hidden house key. I had to jiggle the key a bit and pull the door tight toward me to get the lock to turn.

Oh. Here it is.

The path of the door swing was clear, but that was it. Piles, up to my shoulder, of clothing, mail, shopping bags and God-knows-what-else, were everywhere. Or was it just one continuous pile? Hard to tell. Penny’s home was large, about 4,000 square feet, and everywhere I could see from that front doorway was buried in five feet of debris.

Working with older adults with hoarding tendencies (aka. “Hoarders”) was not new to me. I owned a small business that helped senior citizens move to new, safer, homes. My team and I worked with hoarders, at various stages, every few months.

Penny’s home was beyond any other client project and the sheer depth of the hoard made me shrink back. Can I do this? Am I capable? Her out-of-town adult son had three requests of me. First, Anthony wanted Penny to feel at home in her new Memory Care apartment. He’d ordered all new furniture and clothes for her, but Penny wanted some ballerina figurines to be plucked from the hoard and brought to her new 350-square foot room at a nearby senior living community.

Secondly, Anthony wanted ALL the family photos, fine jewelry and valuable artwork gathered from the hoard. From. The. Hoard. I’m no numbers whiz, but a 4,000 square foot home with a five-foot deep hoard meant my team and I would be digging through 20,000 feet of garbage to, hopefully, recover these requested items. His third request was, once we delivered the photos, jewelry and artwork, that we completely empty the home so he could sell it.

Penny, thankfully, was already gone from her home. A few weeks prior to my visit she took a tumble while letting herself in the front door and a sharp-eyed neighbor called 911. The neighbor, Susan, moved across the street from Penny five years earlier, often chatting by the mailbox. She’d never been invited inside. To Susan, Penny was the pretty little lady with the pink lipstick that feathered into her wrinkles, an ever-present pastel sweater set and weekly “wash & set” hair. Penny would appear outside every few days, waiting for her taxi driver to pick her up. “I haven’t driven in years” she told Susan. Penny would return home a few hours later, always with shopping bags in tow. A landscaping company kept the outside looking lovely. Come to think of it, Susan later admitted, “In five years I never once saw a garbage tote outside for pickup on a trash day.”

The day Penny fell and the first responders came, they took Penny to the hospital. While lying on the gurney, Penny asked Susan to call her son. Anthony lived out of state, was a big-time lawyer and hadn’t been home to visit in the five years Susan lived there. She agreed to call Anthony, peered inside the home and thought “My God, what do I tell him?”

Well, Anthony already knew. His mother had life-long hoarding tendencies that were kept, somewhat, in check by her family. Anthony left for college a few months after high school graduation, 50 years ago, and rarely went back home. When he did, he stayed at a hotel. His father died 10 years after Anthony left home and Penny’s other son died young while serving in the Army. Penny was left alone with her vices.

The horrors I would soon discover were still mystery as I stood in Penny’s doorway that first day, halfway between the so-normal-they-hurt geraniums and the 20,000 square foot manifestation of a tortured life. I was just dipping my toe in to the ocean of a 96-year-old woman’s trauma, mental illness and dementia.

The mess, I soon learned, was truly five-foot deep in every room of the house. I plopped my backpack down in the front doorway, snagging my cell phone to take a few photos- or maybe call for help, who knew? Furniture peaked out of the top of the hoard in what I guessed was the dining room & living room. Looked like a the top of a hutch and maybe a curio cabinet? Five bedrooms, all packed. The stairways and hallways even were piled high. I could discern Penny’s “snail trails” that she made across the top of the hoard so she could move about the house.

I wasn’t grossed out by Penny’s home- there wasn’t any “stinky food garbage” and I truly felt such pain for her. Surely no one wanted to live like this, right? She had to have felt shame as she hid the hoarding so well from the neighbors. If I could give Penny some sort of peace in her new home, perhaps found in some dusty ballerina figurines, then that’s what I’ll do.

I pulled out my phone, sweating now. “Anthony? It’s Anne Marie Bell. I’ll take the job.”

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*Client name & identifying details changed for her privacy.

Read Penny, Part 2 right here!