Funny, how, pretty much the only times I have the opportunity to reflect and/or entertain deep thoughts these days, are during my commute when I’m listening to a podcast.
This morning, I listened to an episode of This American Life, the theme of which was “Home Alone.” One of the three chapters was devoted to a person whose sole job it is to figure out what to do with the belongings of people who have died alone, and have no obvious next of kin, nor friends. You know how, every year, there’s a wave of deaths associated with severe weather, be it a heatwave or a blizzard that knocks the power out? Well, each year there are at least as many folks who just plain die for the usual reasons, but they’re just not noticed or claimed.
They follow this lady, Emily, around while she does her job of trying to find any living soul that’s related to one such woman who has died. The narrator expresses his surprise when Emily classified the decedent as being a “moderate pack rat.” He thinks the house is rather extremely pack-rat-ish. To which, Emily says “Oh no. You can see floor here. You can walk, unfettered, across the room. This is moderate.”
When I was working as a delivery driver in Ithaca, I once had a delivery (in the middle of the day) to a house over on Rte. 13 near the Purity Ice Cream parlor. I had to park several houses down and run to the place, since there’s really nowhere to park on the street. I found the old dump, went through the gate to the back of the house where the main entrance is, and stepped in through the outside screen door to knock on the inside door. In the breezeway, I was surrounded by garbage bags full of kids’ toys and dog toys, bits of detritus just covering the place. The linoleum was destroyed, there was a broken coffee table in a pile of stuff, and the place looked like the town dump had been relocated. The woman who answered the door was in her bathrobe. I’d seen all of this before, in several places throughout my life.
When I was dating Tricia, during college, we often went to visit her mom, who had two young kids. The house resembled what I’ve described above. Junk everywhere. Broken toys, broken furniture, piles of used and unused stuff that someone might care about, or no one might care about. One thing’s for certain, nobody cared enough to make the place presentable.
My dad and my stepmonster lived with their dog, Indy, in a house that transformed (over the course of a decade) from the shiny, beautiful place where I grew up, to a cluttered container for the ever-growing piles of stuff that could hardly be explained. As time went on, I watched the golden house from my childhood memories take on a dingy patina. When my dad died, I spent days and days going through the place to separate the junk from the things anyone would care about. And by junk, that often meant “brand new products, never opened, left in the bag in which they were brought home a few years ago.” And the important things were often buried under tons of…things. This is what lonely people do. They build nests. They surround themselves with things, and cut themselves off from everyone else.
The thing is, my dad was alone. And my stepmonster was alone. They just happened to live together and occasionally get visits from people. They hated each other, but my dad was too stuck in his own “depression” (my word, not his) to actually pull the trigger on divorcing the woman. He distrusted her. He disliked much of what she stood for. He was dissatisfied with what his life with her boiled down to. He was left very alone when my mom died in ‘92, and while indeed my stepmother deprived him of privacy, it’s debatable as to whether or not she ever really provided him with company. And two depressed people in a house can be just as bad as (if not worse than) one.
It’s not something I ever expected to put much thought into again, but hearing this radio show this morning kinda brought it all back fresh into my mind, and actually kinda taught me that this is a universal thing. I’ve seen it a bunch of times, and it’s all over in the world today. People lose touch with reality and withdraw into themselves. Maybe it starts with bad decisions, maybe it compounds itself with more bad decisions. It’s funny to think that the people I’ve known in my life who were “low income” were the same folks who were highly likely to do anything in their power to acquire a vehicle with an expensive car payment and terrible gas mileage. There’s not much sense in it, and it’s a problem that feeds itself.
Really uplifting story, I know, but I just wanted to get it down. I drive through these affluent suburbs every day, and I think to myself that so few of these people have ever seen hard times. It’s not just that they don’t get it, it’s that the concept might not even exist in their minds. They don’t have a memory of the smell of it.
(Either I disagree with one of your assumptions, or I’ve misunderstood something. I apologize in advance if it is the latter.)
You said, “I drive through these affluent suburbs every day, and I think to myself that so few of these people have ever seen hard times. It’s not just that they don’t get it, it’s that the concept might not even exist in their minds. They don’t have a memory of the smell of it.”
Whether you meant “hard times” as in financial hardship or “hard times” as in loneliness and depression, my question is the same: How do you know how many people know the smell of it?
If you meant “hard times” as in financial hardship –
The Bay Area, of all places in the country, is veritably filled with new money. Our landlady, who owns a $1 million+ home, is affluent by the standards we grew up with, but who knows what her childhood and early married life was like before property appreciation helped her net worth? Our friends in SF who own a $1 million+ home also are affluent by the standards we grew up with, yet we know they didn’t grow up that way. There are affluent people who do remember the smell of hard times. The Woodside billionaires who have been more ambitious with their wealth than our landlady or friends nevertheless may still have come from the same place.
If you meant “hard times” as in loneliness and depression –
What do loneliness and depression look and smell like among billionaires? Is pouring money into more works of art and redecorating the master bath for the hundredth time any less of a sign of emptiness and loneliness than the amassing of unneeded gadgets, books, or inappropriate cars? I think that both behaviors represent people grasping to feel as if they are taking a step toward changing an unwanted state of reality, even if that feeling of empowerment or distraction only lasts for the brief time it takes one person to drive home from the store with the latest “must have” that never leaves the box or the time it takes another person to call the party planner regarding the next soiree with faceless “must invites.” There are different ways of trying to fill the hole, but loneliness, emptiness, and impotence to make the necessary changes to improve one’s situation are universal.
I guess I was just avoiding attaching the word “squalor” to my father, but there it is. By “hard times,” I should have said squalor, because that’s what I meant.
All of your observations are true, though. I probably do just assume too much.
Wow. Your description of your dad and stepmonster practically mirrors the relationship (and state of housekeeping) that my dad and stepmom currently share.
It’s really depressing going out to see them, because they’re both depressed, they’ve both given up in a way, and they both show such a lack of care for each other, or, indeed, for anyone.
I find myself asking: is this what marriage looks like? It is outright shocking to me to think you could just be so dismissive of the person you have chosen to share your life with. And I am bewildered by how their lives have just tumbled downhill.
And I feel helpless to do anything to help them.