As I Found It

When my mother’s dementia became so severe that she could no longer stay in the rambling New England Victorian where she had lived for 40 years, most of that time with my father, it fell to me to empty and sell the creaky old manse. Once my mother was out, I essentially moved in and spent the better part of a year sifting through a dense environment created by decades of hoarding, deeply compounded by the Yankee habit of saving too much from past generations.

The house contained thousands of cardboard boxes, often several nested inside a larger one, stacked up in layers against the walls. In the attic, these stacks created a virtual maze.

Despite my mother’s ceaseless accumulation, a lot of what she left behind in her boxes was neatly ordered, though in ways that might have made sense only to her—a system she was no longer able to explain. Much of it had been heavily annotated, often on index cards or Post-it notes as old as their invention, in her tiny, precise handwriting.

She was obsessive-compulsive, a behavior that dementia cured.

The task was the most emotionally difficult thing I have ever done. As a