Clutter control

Hearing to my description of the Old Man's home, the Occupational Therapist asks me "Is it clutter or is it hoarding?" I pause. How to respond? Where does one become the other? When does an ingrained moral duty to save, reuse and repair become an irrational, health-threatening refusal to dispose of useless items? At what point do old-fashioned values of thrift and frugality morph into obsessive-compulsive behaviour? It's true that, at age of 90, my half-brother's 'waste-not, want-not' habits, combined with his loss of mobility following a stroke 8 years ago, mean that his limited living space is severely constrained by an accumulation of things that he wants to keep within arm's reach of the chair in which he spends most of his time. It also means that he hardly has any room to manoeuvre and the situation becoming hazardous.

He is reluctant to throw away:
cardboard boxes, plastic bags, envelopes, food containers, jam jars, magazines, letters and postcards, old batteries, rubber bands, chequebook stubs, pieces of string, shoes and clothes he longer wears, non-functioning electrical equipment and broken articles in general. They all might 'come in handy' - and sometimes do!
This list doesn't include the very large number of books he has acquired, mainly second-hand, over the course of a long and intellectually-curious life, nor the vast quantity of gear and gadgetry related to an age-defying passion for electronic communications.

So, my challenge today was to tackle the mountain of 'essentials' that has engulfed one section of his small living area. I deconstructed it all before he got up in order to pre-empt protest. I insisted on relocating the embedded books into a space I had cleared elsewhere. That reduced the overall bulk which I then refashioned into a more orderly arrangement. (The system of keeping random collections of items within envelopes which are placed in bags which are stored inside boxes does not make for ease of access nor does it expedite the locating of said items when mislaid.) Inevitably a certain amount of material 'disappeared' during the exercise and that will have to find its way into recycling containers around the local area in the dead of night.

My blip shows 'before' and 'after' versions of the same corner. I'm pretty certain that, when I next visit, View B will have reverted to View A in some degree. But I do not see this accumulation of things as pointless hoarding, rather an attempt to maintain control over the unravelling of life's internal discipline. It may look mad but there is more than a little method in it. Our waste-generating, throwaway culture could learn a lot of lessons from this 'make-do-and-mend' mentality.

Compulsive hoarding reaches far more extreme proportions. It is pathological condition which can become life-threatening, indirectly as a fire risk or hygiene issue, or directly as was the case with the Collyer brothers, New York eccentrics who were eventually found dead, entombed within the tunnels they used to burrow through 140 tons of 'garbage' that filled their Manhattan home.