[jyl]

Hoarding is a recognized mental disease.

My aunt filled her place with trash and rotting food. The cops had to arrest her. She was institutionalized soon thereafter.

My dad has three housefuls of stuff, a little bit is cool but mostly it is junk. Boxes of old electrical wire, leftover wood, crap he buys at yard sales, thousands of classical LPs, anything that could conceivably be useful. Like a half used box of my grandmother’s Depends diapers that she didn’t finish before she died. We’ve been trying to get him to move from CA to live with us, he has spent the last 1.5 years “packing”. Since he won’t let anyone help him, and he’s 86 and weak, progress is slow. I rented a 2000 sq ft storage unit in Salem for his stuff. So far he has only got 1 semi load of stuff moved into it. Another container is waiting in a Salem yard for me to hire movers. He has another two containers’ worth of stuff to pack up in CA. I think he packs a box a day, maybe. The situation is impossible but I don’t have a solution. He’s not mentally incompetent, just stubborn, spoiled, irrational, and impossible to reason with.

His 2000 sq ft storage unit is mostly empty. So I’ve been putting my stuff there. Gosh that’s a lot of stuff. I’m thinking it may run in the family.