The Pathology of Stuff

My dear, departed cousin, Marilyn’s father’s and sister’s possessions were so overwhelming that I am convinced that the stress of trying to discard them hastened her own death. Their accumulation of stuff was pathological. When her sister died, and we entered her apartment, there was no room to live. The bedroom was piled high to the ceiling, the bed lost beneath garbage bags full of old clothes, old magazines, bits of paper with sayings, little notes to self, poems, drying-cleaning receipts dating from the ‘70's, recipes and pages ripped from magazines. Closets and baskets bulged with clothes, most of them purchased second hand. Her intent was that everything would be fixed up and sold on consignment. She had neither the health, nor organizational skills to follow through. The entire apartment had become a monument to failed intention. It was terrifying.

The woman who criticized others for wearing scents that aggravated her allergies, or having dust in their houses, had piles of old sachets and packets of highly perfumed bath products and dust, dust, dust everywhere. There was no room in the kitchen to cook. The counters were piled high with stuff. There were cupboards filled with numerous sets of dishes, but she did not cook and had invited no one in for years. There was nowhere to cook. I now understood why she so frequently appeared at my parents around mealtime.

When confronted with this disaster, my instinct was to send for a dumpster, but my aunt insisted that everything must be brought to her home to be examined and reviewed, including the similar contents of an expensive storage locker, as if for clues to why she had lost a 55-year old daughter to an asthma attack while she herself lived to 90. Mercifully, she did not live to see her other daughter die of cancer, at 63, not long after moving back to Canada and carrying on with the throwing out project, which seemed to be endless. My uncle had never thrown away anything. It didn’t help that in throwing out the half century of newspapers, family photos and a piece of paper that turned out to be a $2,000 Canada Savings Bond, fell out of one of the stacks, which meant that scrutiny, and exposure to dust and mold, was immediately increased.

I’ve just finished reading Margaret Atwood’s “The Blind Assassin”. There is chapter in which Iris, the narrator, writes: "Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we’re still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants. We put on display our framed photographs, our parchment diplomas, our silver-plated cups; we monogram our linen, we carve our names on trees, we scrawl them on washroom walls. It’s all the same impulse. What do we hope from it? Applause, envy, respect? Or simply attention, of any kind we can get?"

There is a bumper sticker that says, “The one who dies with the most stuff wins.” I suspect the prize is some kind of revenge on all your relatives who have to deal with getting rid of it. I wonder if we secretly believe that as long as we have stuff, we can’t die. Someone has to look after the stuff, right? My mother, bless her, devoted considerable energy to chucking stuff before she died. I believe she wanted to die. I don’t want to die - yet - but my greatest angst comes from the idea of leaving a huge pile of my foolish junk for someone else to clean up. I have studiously avoided monogramming, but suspect that most of my diplomas, trophies and certificates are no more valuable than those handed to the Tin Man, the Scarecrow and Dorothy. After all, we live in the age of the “self-esteem” movement, and have cap and gown photos for kindergarten “graduation”. I secretly hope, that like my degree, most of my tributes will fall and smash, and I will have a good excuse to chuck them, rather than shell out more money to re-frame them. How long did it take me to throw out the hideous “Leif the Lucky” trophy they handed out for serving on the Winter Carnival committee? How hard it is to discard such things? “What if the person responsible for giving it to you in the first place, catches you doing it?”, you mutter helplessly in your defense. “What if it ends up in garbage dumps of Manila?” you ponder, “and innocent children are killed in an avalanche of your stuff?” It is a frightening and real prospect, but probably unlikely since I live in a sparsely populated part of the globe and we still have our own garbage dumps to fill.

I minds the time a regional librarian of this province was caught tossing old library books in the dump. Someone ratted on him to the local Member and it came up in the house of assembly - “Public servants discarding taxpayers’ property? Shame! Shame! Shame!” After that, he soaked the books in barrels of water, so that he could say they were “water-damaged” and had to be discarded.

My cousin’s father was not related to me by blood, but the nightmarish world of his stuff, and his daughter’s, haunted us all for a long time. On the upside, I have another cousin who is so good at paring things down that I tell her she should hire herself out as a clutter consultant. I am sure that there are a lot of people out there who would pay good money to have someone come in and tell them what to discard. At this point, I wouldn’t mind a large dose of her good sense, then I wouldn’t be sitting at this keyboard instead of “getting on with it.”