When someone dies, their residue – their presence – imprints upon the objects they once kept. A broken pen; a Christmas decoration; a jacket; a suitcase; a TV guide with shows of interest underlined. Previously ordinary things become possessed with the lost magic of their owner’s aliveness, if only in infinitesimal fragments. It is therefore difficult to throw them away. And yet this is what must be done.
My father, when he died two years ago, left behind an inaccessible office, the doorway blocked by magazines and documents, obstructing the path to a desk hidden under piles of boxes, books, photo albums and stationery. Towards the room’s walls, things were increasingly orderless. Stacks folded into one another, forming shapeless masses of paper and plastic, the floor completely concealed. It was the work of decades, and I do not doubt that if my mother had not been fervently committed to preserving the tidiness of every other room, much of their house would have looked like this.
According to the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), hoarding disorder can be identified when, among other things, “The difficulty discarding possessions results in the accumulation of possessions that congest and clutter active living areas and substantially compromises their intended use. If living areas are uncluttered, it is only because of the interventions of third parties.” My father never saw a therapist, so was never diagnosed, but this describes his situation. The condition, often itself a response to grief and trauma, upon death, complicates the grief of those who inherit the hoard.
Around Christmas last year, my mother bravely decided that she was able to face the room, setting herself the goal of discarding at least one full bag a day. I flew to Brisbane to help out. We were meticulous, considering each object to ensure that we weren’t accidentally disposing of a birth certificate or a bar of gold (which, my geologist father remarked before he died, was buried somewhere under the detritus).
The cleaning took on a ritualistic aspect, whereby we separated the small number of things we intended to keep, from the recycling, from the rubbish, from the documents that had to be shredded. As we worked, material kept for its contemporary relevance but now decades old took on a kind of archaeological charm: an Ansett timetable; a how-to-vote card explaining “How to re-elect the Hawke government”; a Sunday Telegraph declaring “Thatcherism crumbling”; a yellowing brochure advertising the opening of Stockland Nathan Plaza, “Townsville’s Largest Most Exciting Shopping Centre”. Other objects presented as melancholy gestures towards an unlived life: a French translation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason; bags and bags of stamps awaiting sorting; magazines unremoved from the plastic in which they had been delivered. And then there were the many hundreds of notebooks, filled with writing. It’s hard to shake the belief that they contain my father’s soul.
Such accumulation is, in a sense, a barricade erected to stave off loss. This strategy entails several ironies, not least that by keeping everything it becomes impossible to find anything. And sitting in the office of the father I love, consigning so many of his possessions to the bin, my resentment originated from that irrational, infantile core, anger that he had managed to preserve everything except for what I wanted most: him.
My father possessed a voracious intellect, was astoundingly quick-witted and movingly kind. He trained and worked as a geologist, a taxi driver and a translator, reading Don Quixote in Spanish and Proust in French. Every facet of life fascinated him and every manifestation of his general fascination was a virtue, with one notable exception: a desire to gather as much of the world as possible into his custody.
I am sympathetic to the view that every object is a marvel. Any piece of furniture, book, magazine, fork, poster, roll of paper towels, if glimpsed from the right angle, gestures towards the miracle of its invention and the anticipation of a future in which it will be used, appreciated. But my father would have needed to out-age Methuselah in order to simply read the books he owned, and would have undoubtedly used such a lifespan to collect too many more.
Discarding may entail an admission of the inevitability of death but it can also account for the precious fragility of life. To accept that an object will have no future use is to accept that our time is limited, and that we must decide how best to spend the little that we have. We are not obliged to treasure something just because a loved one treasured it. We are better served by looking less to what they owned or wore or touched, and more to who they were.
Aware of the absurdity of the monument he had created, my father wrote annotations on his office doorframe, so numerous that they crept up to the ceiling and on to the wall. Two stand out. The first, “To discard: to admit failure” is a joke, but it is a bitter one. While cleaning his room, unable to do so with his permission – the thing we want most from the dead – I try to find the beauty in acknowledging that the majesty of material things, of people too, persists, whether we have them or not. I often think, happily, about another of my father’s doorframe notes, scribbled in fading ink: “Life is too full of richness and beauty.” About this he was right.
• Dan Dixon is a writer and academic living in Sydney
