In Defense of Keepsakes

Watching A&E’s reality show, “Hoarders,” is precisely like watching the proverbial train wreck. It is gruesome and gory and filled with pathos, but I cannot turn it off. The premise is always the same: we hear the traumatic history of the homeowner as we tour the house, every room crammed to the ceiling with incidental, useless articles of furniture, clothing, printed materials, outdated food, odd bits of machinery, and an occasional dead animal. Often there are collections such as imported beer cans or Peanuts comic strips, and, in some of the more unsavory habitats, garbage is strewn everywhere. With no passageways through the mess, the hoarders climb like mountain goats to venture from kitchen to bedroom. The one cleared seat is invariably in front of the television, and the bathrooms are universally appalling. Then the therapists and the clean-up crews arrive, and the real drama begins.

What turns the tale and rivets me to this program is the revelation that hoarders are generally well-educated professionals, men and women who are successful and intelligent and yet have the compulsion to save every iota from their lives. To save what they have and also buy more to add to their stash. I myself am a saver, the keeper of my family’s past, and I relate totally to those tearful individuals who cannot part with a greeting card or a teddy bear or an article of clothing because it is associated with a particular memory. “But you have the memory,” the therapist always says to the hoarder clinging to her grandmother’s quilt or her daughter’s first baby shoes. “You don’t need to keep this.”

I’m not so sure. What has become of the notion of preserving memories through items passed on to us from our ancestors: the lock of hair or the pressed flower or the letters of a loved one? As a writer, I worry that we are becoming too easily dismissive of the very things that spark our senses, our imagination, our wonder about people who lived in different times and different places. And what of the next generation of writers, bereft of tactile prompts like hand woven fabrics or handwritten letters or even so much as an email to hold in their hands? What will they have to say about us?

I admit that “Hoarders” has made me a more cautious saver, and while I feel virtuous with every bag of old things I haul off to Goodwill, I have also begun to consider the merit of labeling what I keep. By recording the name of the quilter and the year of her creation or the significance of the people and the place in the 1942 photo, I will be saving an artifact rather than a mere piece of trash. I will be leaving a legacy for tomorrow’s storytellers.