Excavating Obsession
My husband and I own some rental property. Last year around this time, one of our tenants died. She had been dealing with Breast Cancer treatment for several years. She had isolated herself in her apartment the entire pandemic. She never called us to fix anything. She ordered things online. By the time the paramedics came and broke down her door, her mind was gone.
Mine was just recovering. I had been very sick too, and hadn’t checked on her in a long time.
The entire apartment was filled with trash. Over my waist. The office was filled to the ceiling with boxes. Unopened boxes from ebay. Filled with books- entire sets of books by popular authors. Entire sets of dishes. Enough Christmas decorations to fill a 5x8 closet to the top.
That’s just the center of the rooms. The walls were lined with bookshelves 6 feet high. They were filled with paperback books. In front of the paperback books were small glass figurines. Many Hundreds of them. The entire two bedroom apartment was lined with precarious fragile glass. The kitchen cabinets were filled with 4 sets of fine china and 3 sets of antique stemware. The bedroom held all her vintage clothes. And some of her mother’s. Childhood clothes filled a dresser. Not kidding. So many moths.
The project had to be done in layers. The top layer was bags of dirty diapers. It had gotten to the point she couldn’t take out the trash anymore.
This was a smart lady. This was a normal lady. She didn’t take drugs. She had been a paralegal. She had a good job and a husband and a big house at one point in her life. She was active in local politics and her community. She was trying to be a good person. It had all slipped away, and she couldn’t figure out why. Even her beloved mother, who died of Alzheimer’s…
She had books on every religion and psychological fad I can think of. And Notebooks. Hundreds of notebooks filled with handwriting since the 1970s. Another hundred binders filled with printouts of writing from her computer.
Those cancer drugs made everything worse. Her mouth was ravaged, blisters everywhere. Her teeth were fuzzy. She was on disability and couldn’t afford a dentist. She was too afraid anyway, she risked her life for chemotherapy.
This woman, who was earnestly trying to get better, following all the medical advice to the letter- only got worse. She sat in her apartment and collected cats. She walked around barefoot. By the time I was involved, her legs and feet were so infected they were the size of an elephant’s. The doctors told her it was edema gave her diuretics. Her table was covered with the bottles.
Finally after being picked up and put back into bed by the paramedics, we were called by the neighbors.
She refused to cooperate with anyone. She lied to her doctors and to us. Told us she had a friend coming to help her. She got even worse. She ended up in the hospital.
And after all that effort and suffering and ringing the cancer bell, they gave her Covid. And she never came back.
It was a harsh landing after thinking so much better and writing the hypothesis.
I’m almost done remodeling the apartment. What a long, strange trip it’s been.
