For awhile after my husband’s father died, we feared that his widow was soon going to follow him. They had been married for over sixty years. For almost a month all she seemed to want to do was sleep and she was apathetic to her family’s questions and suggestions about what to do next with her life. Eventually she snapped out of it and became interested in life and far more energetic. In hindsight, what we now realize, is that being his care-giver had taken a tremendous toll on her, plus she needed to adjust internally to her new situation.

Grieving is a process. Generally there are three stages of grief: the initial shock, the experiencing of the emotions, and the recovery.

In the first stage of grief, the initial shock, everything seems chaotic to your parent. There is an inability to function. Decision-making is beyond her. At this point she needs to have things done for her. This is a time to help with the mail and the paperwork and coordinate the efforts of others.

• Collect the needed papers right away. Locate deeds, bank books, investment account statements, insurance policies, Social Security information, birth and marriage certificates, military papers,  and the will if there is one.
• Arrange to have funds available, if necessary.
• Notify the Social Security Administration, insurance companies, employer, any union or professional organizations, creditors, financial institutions, and any others you can think of.
• Organize the papers of the deceased and put them in a safe place to be dealt with later.

In the second stage of grief – dealing with the emotions, be prepared for this to take a long while as your parent processes all the ways that life has changed.

• Be prepared to help your parent with “firsts” such as the holidays which will likely bring new pain.
• Provide for help with daily money management.
• Offer to help with organizing the papers and possessions of the deceased parent.
• If possible, avoid moving your parent out of the family home during the first year.

In the third stage of grief – the recovery, your parent may become more ready and willing to deal with the possessions of the deceased spouse.

• There may be ways to honor the person through the choices you make such as donating items to organizations that were important to him or her.
• You could create a memory book of photos and family stories.
• You might hold a yard sale with the proceeds going for something that was significant to your parent.
• Don’t be in a hurry to discard the deceased’s possessions. Watch for readiness on the surviving parent’s part.

As much as possible your family should be involved with helping your parent go through all the changes the death of a spouse entails. Sometimes the services of a professional organizer might be what is needed for coordinating the process for the family.

Pack-Rat Parents – What Are They Thinking?!

When you have a parent who collects things and can’t or won’t get rid of any of them even when it endangers their safety, you wonder why they behave this way. There are several thought processes that may  be at work here.

If your mother keeps everything, then she can avoid the anxiety of making a decision. She’s thinking “what if I throw this out and I need it some day”.

She may have developed extreme emotional attachments to her things. Her things are more like extensions of herself. If she was to get rid of the item it would be like  letting go of a part of herself. Her things re-enforce her identity. You may not value the little dress she made for you when you were eight years old, but for her it is a reminder of when she was young and vital and needed.

She might have trouble with categorizing. You, as a non-hoarder, see similarities and can group items together. Your mother, however, sees only the ways things are different and baffles you with the ways she creates piles of paperwork and other things that make no sense to anyone else.

So, what can you do? Start by listening. Engage your parent in a discussion where you listen more than talk. Let your mom tell you the history of the items and what she thinks she might do with them someday. Just let her talk without offering your own evaluations. You are creating a relationship hopefully based on trust.

Some people become pack-rats from excess buying. I have helped clear out homes where there were rooms full of stashes of unopened purchases…piles of them. They were acquired from shopping trips to the mall, mail order catalogs, internet shopping, and phone solicitations. For the people with this kind of hoarding it’s the shopping not the utilizing that provides the thrill of the kill. The unfortunate thing about it is that they can’t turn it off. They may go into debt over their heads in the pursuit of the relief for this need. Often, they hide the receipts for their purchases from their spouses, and possibly from themselves. What I have found most unfortunate is that when you try to help them recover some of their expenses by selling these items, they bring in next to nothing. If others want the items at all, they want them at bargain prices. In some cases the best I’ve been able to do is to get a tax deduction for them by providing a slip of estimated value to be signed by a receiver at Goodwill. As with all forms of hoarding, this compulsive shopping/acquiring behavior is beyond the person’s capacity to control. What is needed here is the family’s love and support for this person, some professional help from the medical and/or counseling field, and possibly someone trained as an organizer to work with people in this kind of situation.

Some people have grown up in homes that were chronically overflowing with miscellaneous possessions and this was accepted as normal. Some of you may have cringed at the thought of bringing friends into your home because you knew your home was really far from normal. Very often it is one parent that is the hoarder and the other one accepts the situation in order to keep the peace. In other situations you notice that your aging parent is hanging on to inconsequential things that they normally would have thrown out such as junk mail and you wonder why.  In both cases the parents seem to lack insight into their situation and are unaware that this could be a problem for anyone else.

How do you tell a hoarder from an enthusiastic collector? Hoarders collect things but collecting is not the same as hoarding. It is considered hoarding when things have accumulated to such a degree that it hampers proper use of a room and/or poses a safety risk. Hoarding is more properly defined as the  acquisition of and failure to discard a large number of possessions that appear to be useless or of little value. If you suggest getting rid of any of it the person reacts with fear or anger. Worse, if you do anything about it, like clean up while they are gone, you have made an egregious error and created a breach of trust.

Some people who were collectors because of a hobby begin to lose control of the accumulations as they age. In fact, what was a mild problem can become more full-blown and noticeable with age. They leave everything out in the open as a reminder, believing that if they put things away they would forget about them. You visit your mother and notice that the dining room table is layered with many months’ accumulation of mail. A lot of it is junk mail but you also notice that there are bills that have not been opened or even bills that were paid twice. You ask if you can help her go through this pile and throw some of it away and the response is fear. You ask a few questions and learn that she worries that she might throw out something that is important or she thinks she might want to use that credit card offer someday/maybe. You realize she has lost the ability to make distinctions.