I’ve been recovering from surgery for the past couple of months and thinking a lot about how hoarding relates to health and hearth. Namely, once your health gets out of whack, it’s easy for your hearth to follow suit.

That truth reminded me yet again how important it is to get my affairs in order while I’m still physically and mentally able to do so.

Good Health Isn’t Guaranteed

For the first month of recovery, I couldn’t even push a vacuum, and I certainly wasn’t able to stoop or lift things. The joy of tidying up was nonexistent. Luckily, my husband could take care of the heavy lifting, but my physical limitations were frustrating despite me knowing what to expect.

It’s easy to take good health and mobility for granted, but those qualities are more tenuous than we’d like to believe, something the pandemic has driven home in a big way.

Plus, when you’re living in a hoard your hearth can mess up your health. If my dad didn’t return to a hoarded house after his own surgery, maybe he would’ve had a better chance of staying out of the hospital and of fighting off the infection that ultimately took his life.

And the odds of successfully cleaning up a hoard once you’re suffering from dementia are slim to none, a fact that was underlined twice and highlighted in neon yellow when my mom began deteriorating from Alzheimer’s.

Leave It Better Than You Found It

These are the reasons that push me to work so hard to get all of my crap in order before some unforeseen event makes me physically or mentally unable to manage my multitude of things. And I’ll have even less of an excuse when what befalls me is some long foreseen event, such as death.

We all know it’s going to happen, we mostly pretend it won’t, and we all feel a bit cheated of time when it finally does. The question is how much of a mess we’re going to leave behind for our loved ones to deal with when we go.

My goal is to leave people with fun memories. And maybe a stash of Garbage Pail Kids cards.

Hope and joy,

Rachel