Three and a Quarter Boxes

A note from the author: This essay is neither sexual nor administrative in nature. I won't be offended if, based on that information, you decline to read it. 

I've been going through a lot with my father, lately, and this last month it's culminated into a crisis. Writing about it helps alleviate my anxiety. If you do take the time to read the piece, thank you, and know that I'm well, and coping.

My elderly father’s home holds thousands of books. Many were my late mother’s; she was an avid reader who collected paperback mysteries, Georgette Heyer romances, Holocaust memoirs, and editions on natural history by the score, who picked up old copies of Dickens and Austen and all her favorite British authors from library used book sales. She squirreled away her treasures two or three stacks deep in her bookcases, packed so densely they had to be extracted with delicacy, like sticks from a Jenga tower, lest the contents detonate. My father’s library is at least as extensive, though it’s mostly composed of dry, historical volumes about the Revolutionary War. His volumes occupy bookcases of their own—hefty, heavy, hand-crafted creations of oak that stretch from floor to ceiling.

Decades ago, when he retired, thousands more editions that had occupied his academic office came home to roost in my childhood bedroom. On a visit, I managed to persuade him to donate two or three hundred back to the university. Stunned archivists watched in horror as I single-handedly unloaded box after box of the dusty, super-specialized tomes onto their loading dock. Former students and a couple of specialized libraries have taken a few more off his hands. But his floors still bow from the weight of the combined library that remains, stacked and packed in their high, high piles in every case, on every table, on chairs and tables and dressers and in corners, alike.

Over the decades, I’ve begged my father to divest himself of more, but he’s always dismissed the notion. Our family loves books, he tells me. We never throw them away.

And out of all these books, these thousands of heavy, uncatalogued constructions made of cheap pulp or fine linen stock, of ink, of glue and cardboard and fabric, my father has chosen to salvage less than a dozen—his collection of Horatio Hornblower novels, from his boyhood. When I pry them from the shelf where for years they’ve been moldering for half a century, I become apprehensive at the creaking noises made by the living room wall into which it’s built. At the end of Little Dorrit, a neglected house collapses upon itself. I can so easily see that happening here.

Lined them against the bottom of this small cardboard box, the Forester novels seem like a meager selection. “Are you sure there aren’t any other books you want to take, when you move? Or are you not reading any more?”

“I can read,” snaps my father, from where he lies on the living room sofa. “My cam reads for me.” His vision is so poor and uncorrectable that he nearly qualifies as legally blind; he owns a device that takes a photo of a printed page and reads it aloud in a robotic voice. But no, he doesn’t read, not often. Mostly he watches movies on his iPad, held at the tip of his nose, or listens to the endless stream of Trump indictment news that plays on MSNBC. “I’m allowed to take what I like with me, you know.”

“I agree.” My tone is conciliatory. My father has decided—conceded, really—to agree with my sister’s insistence he move into her home. As fiercely as he desires his independence, it’s obvious that he cannot live on his own any longer. Although he was ambulatory in March after I nursed him through his strokes, he’s deteriorated since. “I think you absolutely should take whatever your heart desires. That’s why I’m trying to make sure these are the only books you want, out of—” I wave my arms, indicating the enormity of the house and its contents.

We have spent the last few hours taking an inventory of his possessions, in order to decide what should go with him. Not an easy task: my father is a hoarder. Not only of books, but anything else his Depression-childhood brain thinks might be of use. He has never thrown away a plastic cat sand tub, for example. As they empty, he fills them with water and stores them in the basement, in case of…I don’t know what. Drought? Famine? Nuclear war? During his hospitalization, I divested the kitchen of the literal hundreds of glass salsa and peanut butter jars he’d accumulated over the years, as well as stacks of plastic trays, several feet high, from Le Menu frozen meals from the 1980s. He buys cat food by the case and keeps it piled on what once was a piano; the dining room table is mostly taken up by three non-operational microwave ovens with which he can’t bear to part.

Every time I open a cupboard, out spill hundreds—literal hundreds!—of old margarine tubs and their plastic lids, warped with time. Baggies everywhere are stuffed with thousands of twist-ties so old that their paper has rotted away and the wire beneath corroded. It’s impossible to access his flatware because the drawer in which it lies is packed with plastic forks and spoons from decades of takeout, never thrown away, but lovingly hand-washed and stockpiled for an oncoming cutlery emergency. Dirty packets of ketchup and soy and duck sauce, cloudy with age, occupy their own shelf in what’s supposed to be a china cabinet.

He won’t throw out anything, even it doesn’t work. An old electric can opener that he received as a wedding present when Kennedy was President hasn’t functioned since Ford was in office, but it makes a fine stand for the 4-decade-old ceramic mugs packed with dried-out felt-tip pens he can’t bring himself to discard. I seriously upset him on this trip when I reclaim for recycling a first-generation, 13-year-old original iPad. It no longer works, mind you, but placed crosswise atop a metal trash can next to his bed, it’s a perfect little table for his nighttime cup of Pepsi. When I haul an actual little table from another part of the house to his bedside instead, he decides to use it as his upstairs walker, though it’s unstable and low and in no way designed to support his considerable weight.

The house is stuffed with stuff. I’ve made attempts in the past to spring clean, to expunge all the items in his pantry with expiration dates from the mid-1990s, to divest him of the twist-ties and Tostitos salsa jars and the foil trays from ancient TV dinners, to trash the stacks of Halloween candy bought, but never distributed, that have aggregated on the table by the front door for nigh on thirty years. Months later, somehow it’s all returned, or been replaced. My dad abhors a vacuum more than nature ever might.

It saddens me that, after an adult lifetime of accumulation, of amassing so much trivial and unused junk, of outwitting calamity by caching hundreds of gallons of stale water in his basement, that this old and frail man is suddenly willing to walk away from it all, carrying only a small suitcase of clothing and three—three and a quarter, now—small cardboard boxes. All he wants to take with him to my sister’s house are his most recent tax returns, his diplomas, a winter coat, a few framed photographs of his parents and of my mother, the Horatio Hornblowers, and his cats’ rabies certificates. How fucking sad is that? I look around the living room, trying to find something else that might be of meaning. “What about your book?” I finally ask, inspired.

“You packed the only books I want.”

“What about your book, though?” In the late eighties, my father produced his only academic monograph, a product of deep research into an obscure area of colonial history. When I google it today, the title only elicits a handful of citations before trailing off into unrelated websites. “The book you wrote.”

“Of course I want my book!” he thunders. “Why would you try to take away my book?”

“I’m not trying to take away your book!” I point out, affronted. I’ve already put a shrink-wrapped copy into the box. The slender volume barely adds any weight. “Just now, I suggested you take it.”

“I want my book!” He grumbles to himself. “You’d understand, if you had written any books of your own.”

I have to seal my lips shut, so that I don’t betray how deeply he’s wounded me. In better times, he might have remembered I’ve had sixteen novels published.

Earlier this year, after a week in the hospital’s neurology wing and then two more in a rehab hospital, my dad’s healthcare network set up a month’s worth of regular home visits from clinicians. One was a handsome male nurse who’d show up several times a week to check his blood pressure and other vitals. Another was the physical therapist who assigned him exercises to regain full mobility. A third was an occupational therapist who recommended home changes and made sure he could do the tasks necessary to take care of himself. If he followed their recommendations, they all told him, he’d surely make a full recovery, and have even more mobility than before the event.

After a full week of home visits, I took my father to a follow-up appointment with his general practitioner. “So,” said the doctor, a white, silver-haired older man like my father. “How’re you doing?”

Immediately my father began complaining. “I’d be a hell of a lot better if you gave me tips to get these god-damned therapists off my back.”

The doctor looked at him and replied, “How about you be nice to them and do what they ask?”

I knew that wasn’t going to happen. My father doesn’t just neglect his health—he rolls his eyes, says what he thinks the professionals want to hear, then promptly discards all their advice. He’d spent that entire month being the worst patient in every way imaginable. In the hospital, he threw actual screaming, kicking tantrums with his team of multiple doctors when they gave him news he didn’t like or refused to release him. He never understood that the staff were attempting to navigate him back to independence. Instead, he felt they were inconveniencing him, keeping him from the nest of filth and decay where he wanted to curl up and spend the rest of his days.

There was a point toward the end of my month-long stay with him it hit home that despite all the expense, all the exercises, all the schedules and his promises of change, all this gargantuan effort on his behalf, none of it was going to take. The occupational therapist had visited one afternoon to point out rug after little rug that needed to be removed. Each posed a walking hazard to an old man with a cane. Most of these rugs were former bathmats and even U-shaped toilet rugs with which my father couldn’t bear to part. Their fuzzy surfaces threadbare and so ancient that the rubber backings had disintegrated into dust, dozens covered every bare expanse of wood. A score more, hanging in a thick pile like a horde of trapper’s furs, lay over a second-floor banister.

So, trying to be a good son who didn’t want his father to slip on a rug and give himself a concussion on a pile of microwave ovens, I’d collected all the rugs, wheezing as each released its grime and must. I was heading to toss them in the trash in his alley when he barked, “Don’t throw those out!”

“Why?” I wanted to know.

“They’re perfectly good rugs!”

They’re not good rugs at all. “They pose a hazard,” I reminded him. “Your occupational therapist told you to remove them.”

“Well, once she’s out of here, I’m putting ‘em back!” he said.

That’s the moment I realized he wasn’t taking seriously any of what had happened. The rugs would be spirited away from the eagle eye of the OT, but only for as long as she visited. It wasn’t just these stupid little throw rugs, though. It was everything. The exercises that I’d carefully recorded for him in his own words, to ensure he’d be able to understand what he needed to do—he intended to disregard them. The talking blood pressure machine his doctor insisted he purchase and run twice daily, and which I’d made so simple for him to use—it would molder away beneath a layer of dust and discarded plastic bags.

Once I left, he was going to abandon the simple-as-pie system I’d instituted for getting rid of expired foods. He’d only use the dual pillbox system the rehab nurses had insisted upon until my back was turned, and then he’d go back to twisting lids and scrabbling for pills from the chaos of bottles, old and new, overflowing the upstairs hallway. I’d bought new sheets and blankets for his bed to replace the 40-year-old grimy tatters I found him sleeping upon—and I’d thrown those out—but once I was gone, he’d decree they were too fancy for every-night use, hide them away in the linen cupboard, and replace them with something worn and uncomfortable and long past its prime. I’d bought him a whole new wardrobe of easy-to-wear clothing, warm and clean with elastic waistbands, and shoes that he could slip on without having to fumble with laces—but although he claimed to love them, in my absence he’d be pulling on the same decrepit professorwear he’s worn since the 1960s with the tattered hems, the fabric ridden with holes and pee stains, the fussy buttons he no longer can navigate.

Despite surviving a life-changing event that could have left him disabled or dead, my father, the professor, had learned nothing. None of it had sunk in. He had zero intention of making any significant changes to his life. That’s what seemed suddenly so clear, as he defied me to take those stupid rugs to the trash. All the work I’d done that previous month, all the backbreaking labor, the worry, the consultations, the phone calls, the trips to hardware and medical supply stores, the entire nauseating afternoon it had taken to clean from his refrigerator foods so expired they had fossilized. I’d done it out of duty and love, but he didn’t give a fuck. I’d only wasted my time.

A little earlier that March, the day my father came home from the rehabilitation hospital, I made a sweep through the house to clear up some of the most egregious downstairs trash. To be frank, I didn’t want the at-home nurse to arrive and stagger at the sight of all the deterioration and hoarding, then instantly call social services. So I grabbed several plastic grocery bags from his collection of thousands and made a circuit around the living room.

Gone, the dozens of wadded-up used Kleenex lying on every surface that ‘still have one more blow’ in them. Into the bags, all the used Q-tips set onto the mantel and end tables that ‘could still be useful.’ Charities mail my dad all kinds of crap as an enticement to giving. From these vultures, he’d collected on his coffee table no less than forty-two free manicure sets—the flimsy miniature kind suitable for giving the residents of a dollhouse a nail trim, not fit for human use—and set them out for display. I left him one and cleared off the rest. From the bookcases I snatched his piles of old wall calendars, many of which date back to the seventies (“You can reuse them again when the right year rolls around, you know!”) and the sacks filled with empty prescription bottles.

The real scourge of the charities are the return address labels. They’re cheap to make and send, and my father has never discarded a single one. The thick packets of peel-and-stick labels portray gentle scenes of winter snow and spring meadows, of fauns frolicking among wildflowers, of nighttime city skylines and jolly holiday figures. Thousands upon thousands of these return address labels can be found in every room of my father’s house. In the living room alone, I collect enough from the TV stand and the entertainment center (why have one when you can have both, in my father’s opinion), the coffee table, the sofa, both chairs, the bookcases, and from the interior of a carpeted cat tower. They filled no less than five supermarket bags.

I was heading through the kitchen on my way out to the trash can when my dad grabbed one of the bags from my hands. “Who said you could throw anything away?” I explained that I was trying to clean up before his nurse arrived, but he erupted angrily, “You are throwing my life in the trash!”

This, more than any other experience of the previous month, galvanized me into an ice-cold rage. “You know,” I intoned in the clipped, perfect diction I adopt only when furious. “Many people your age might look at their children and see what capable and competent adults they’ve become and consider that a life well spent. Others might reflect upon their career and personal accomplishments or upon their happy memories and consider those their life. If you think—” and here I brandished one of the bag beneath his face and shook it. “If you think that five trash bags filled with cheap manicure sets and eleven thousand return address labels are your life, then I say you’ve had a pretty fucking lousy life. How about you think about the things that matter, from now on, and be happy those aren’t being taken away from you?” Then I stomped out to the alley, slamming the door behind me.

Five months after that confrontation, I’m standing in my dad’s living room, having stowed everything he wants to take to my sister’s. In a few weeks, if all goes to plan, a hired crew will invade the house and do a complete cleanout of everything under the roof. There’s nothing here that I want. I’ll pack up what photographs my dad leaves behind, but I won’t be taking home anything else. Save for that small suitcase of clothing and the three-and-a-quarter boxes I’ve collected for him, my dad is simply walking away from everything he’s spent a lifetime hoarding.

So what’s been his end game, then? What’s been the point of hiding what was once a comfortable and welcoming home beneath layers of trash? Was it an attempt at being economical? It’s going to cost us thousands to discard these shambles he leaves behind. Was it a grand intention to repurpose things? Because the broken-down furniture and unwearable clothing donated, the junk trashed, the cat jugs emptied of their old water and tossed in a dumpster. Those thousands of books will probably end in a landfill, somewhere. Such a waste.

Throughout my young adulthood, my dad always harped on about how I needed to buy a home, how real estate was the best investment I’d ever make. Surely, though, he has to understand that simply buying a house isn’t enough. Owning it isn’t sufficient. That investment has to be maintained and updated and taken care of. Issues need to be addressed before they become problems; problems needs the attention of experts before they become disasters. 

Whether for his home or his health, he’s done none of these things. I wonder if he suspected, last March, that those five bags of return address labels were just a harbinger of what was to come.