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A few years ago my friend's father passed away. My friend's mother continued to live in the house for another year or so. She never worked and had to eventually sell the house and downsize.
My friend had referred to her mother as a hoarder before. I've seen the reality TV shows about hoarders. But you don't really understand just how bad the problem is until you spend several days helping your friend clean out their childhood home for sale, filling up several dumpster bags worth of... Stuff. Apparently the mother has always had some mental health problems and a shopping addiction, but spending over a year alone in that house drove her off the deep end.
We could have opened an entire new Harbor Freight store. There were clothes in sizes I didn't know existed. My wife casually found a pistol just shoved in a random box. It was madness.
Came for meme comments, left with sadness and misery
My MIL once brought a trash bag full of clothes for my wife, from friend who didn't want them. Most of them were brand new with tags still on them. We thought it was strange, but they mostly fit and we didn't think too much about it. Next visit she brings two more big garbage bags of new clothes, and one of the bags had dirt (like actual earth/dirt) on the outside. It turned out that the friend was a shopaholic and had been stashing the bags of clothes under the house so her husband didn't see, but she was running out of room, and was trying to make space.
We stopped taking the clothes. It felt like taking advantage of someone's mental illness. Never met the lady, but seemed sad.
I grew up in this kind of house. My spouse retrained me. I didn’t know that it was weird for your living space to smell like urine.
Glad you improved your situation
I enjoyed the movie Driveways that in part is about cleaning out a hoarder's house. Plus it's got Brian Dennehy in it, it's his last movie before he died.