The House That Held Everything: A Family's Hidden Hoarding and the Secrets Left Behind

An unexpected inheritance leads to a shocking house of hoarding and a year-long question to understand the deep connection between humans and their objects.

I am a detective of the deceased as in my hands, their possessions bring my departed relatives to life. As I separate significant items from garbage, I am able to peel apart and expose the emotional underpinnings of hoarding and make sense of the difference between collecting and hoarding. There are recognized genetic connections to hoarding and these take me inward to question my own behavior. By combing through their possessions, I discover the truth about my relatives, their human natures, the family secrets they hid. With each revelation my preconceived judgments progressively shift from disgust at the detritus, what I see as the flotsam of lives, to feelings of empathy. I learn how after death, each of us continues to live in the items we have possessed.

As wide-ranging as genealogical discoveries can be, they do not usually lead to a year-long immersion inside the House of a Hoarder. Yet that is what happened to me. It's Always A Secret brings a reader into the world inhabited by an estimated 19 million Americans who are hoarders, many unseen, fearful of humiliation if their secret is revealed. Although I was aware of the widespread existence of hoarding behavior, especially since the A&E television series Hoarders has had 13 seasons, from 2009 to 2021 (and may have a possible Season 14). I had never considered that this behavior would interest or touch me, thought I did not know any hoarders, and I could never become one. I was wrong.

In researching family history in 2017 my sister Ellen learns that our first cousin Bob had died in 2016 at age 67. She knows that she, my brothers, and I are the next of kin but none of us had been notified. A little more research shows that Bob had not had a funeral until six months after he had passed away. (There is an aura of mystery in this fact which we eventually solve.) We are able to document our status as surviving family and in 2017 when I enter the Cherry Hill, New Jersey home that Bob left behind, and we inherited, I discover rooms filled wall to wall, floor to ceiling, with piled up items from years of secret hoarding, but also the disciplined collecting, of clocks, glassware, Asian porcelain pieces, toy trains and more. During my year in this house, from 2017-2018, I learn the truth of my grandparents' marriage through documents found. I begin to understand the link between people and their possessions. Like a Sherlock Holmes of the emotions, I feel the lives of others in the objects they held close and were unable to discard. A new empathy wells up within me and I realize that objects actually bring their owners to life in my hands.