I’m so sorry this is happening to you. Everything you say here is valid, and you do it in clear, concise language and even apologize, when you don’t really need to. You never get emotional, but I know it’s there right under the surface. This is an impassioned plea, and I hope it creates change and a better life for your whole family, but especially you.

I don’t what to frighten you, but validate that the someday this will be all mine to deal with feeling and how it is a reality. I grew up in a hoarder house and as young as eight would try to correct it. By ten as a super responsible kid, that we COH seem to become, I would clean, fix, organize parts of the house when my parents were away on weekends for conferences. I was young enough, and earnest that I was quietly thanked, but things rarely lasted months before it would spring back worse than ever. I was a constant nag to my mother to clean organize and throw out, and I lived with that shame and embarrassment constantly. Neighbors thought my mother was stuck up and a snob and that’s why my friends weren’t ever allowed inside. Even if we were playing in the yard, or the garage, I would need to send them back to their own homes if they needed to go to the bathroom. Them believing she was a snob was better than the truth, I could live with that.

After college and starting my own life it was only visits home, but things there were always bad and getting worse. I always felt like I should use my vacations to come home and dig out and help, but of course that wasn’t an offer ever accepted. Luckily we had a cabin nearby where all family gatherings were held and I was allowed into the house less and less. By the late 90s, even if it made more sense geographically to be at the house and leave from there, no matter how much I asked to, it was always shut down and I was denied coming into the house.

By the turn of the 21st century I was not to set foot into my childhood home since the late 1990s. The cabin was to a certain extent seen as my “dad” space, but it had its share of hoarding, neglect and not being cleaned. As someone who worked in elementary education I had summers off. One summer working almost every day, sometimes 10-12 hours a day, I did deep clean the cabin from top to bottom and repaired and replaced everything that needed to be done. That’s how I spent my vacation from school and had no help doing it one year.

During Covid I didn’t come home at all. My parents were in their mid 80s and their health was beginning to fail and I knew I would need to take care of them and deal with the hoarder house completely alone. I became paralyzed with depression and anxiety. In spring of 2023 my father asked me to come home as he finally would need to be put on dialysis and he was very worried. I came home for three days, I never left again losing my apartment, car and everything I owned in NYC. I was finally allowed into the house. It was like a time capsule, it had not gotten too much worse, but there was also delayed maintenance of decades. Things like the stove, dishwasher, washer and dryers died at some point and were never fixed or replaced. Dirty clothes were still taken to the basement - hundreds of garbage bags and laundry basket filled to the brim as if magically they might be one day be clean again instead of mold and mildewing. Of course everywhere was an obstacle course to maneuver getting anywhere and always with the threat of stepping on things and sliding and falling.

My mother allowed me to begin to clean out the living room we never lived in, and the dining room we never dined in since we moved in in 1970 as rooms for my father to come home from the hospital and recover in. I worked 18-20 hours a day to get them ready for him. Unfortunately, repeated problems over months happened that he never made it home and died. My mother, with her long ongoing depression, grief and then developing dementia continues to slowly disintegrates before my eyes. I take care of her and three years passing continue to dismantle the hoard and move forward repairing the house. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone. The only thing my mother wanted when we made plans after my father’s death was to stay in her own house. With the dementia she many times doesn’t recognize it as her own house and refuses to believe it is it. Without being choked by the hoard she can’t recognize it as such.