We are sometimes hired to declutter and organize someone’s home because of a new medical condition that requires changes in how they live. Sometimes, in fact, we are called because someone is in the hospital or rehab and cannot be discharged until they have a safe home to return to.
Some clients will now be using a walker or wheelchair, for example, and will need their home re-configured to allow room to maneuver these tools. Some will need a full-time caregiver, and will need to free up space to accommodate them.
For many of our clients this is an inconvenience or a sad reminder of their loss of independence. But they are eager for it to commence so they can return home and resume their old life as much as possible. However, for our intensely private clients, these changes can be emotionally devastating. These clients have spent years, even decades, making their home a personal sanctum, untouched by anyone else. Suddenly, they are helpless as others descend on the space, making decisions without our client’s input.
I often think of our client Dan as an excellent example of this. Dan rented a small one-bedroom apartment in the East Village. He was in his fifties and had fallen quite ill and spent months in rehab. His doctors were ready to discharge him and he was eager to move back home, but there were a few obstacles. He lived on the fourth floor of a building without an elevator, he was quite a collector, and his apartment was kind of a disaster.
Dan was an intensely private person, and he didn’t want anyone seeing his apartment, not even his landlord. As a result, his apartment had not been painted in thirty years and many things had fallen into a state of disrepair. At one point the floor of the bathroom had started to sink. Instead of having his landlord repair it, Dan bolted a heavy cable to the toilet and then secured the cable into the bathroom wall so that the toilet was essentially suspended from the wall and didn’t add weight to the floor.
Dan had not kept his home clean. It is possible cleaning was never a priority to him, or he may have cleaned more when he was healthy but found it too difficult when his illness progressed. In either case, by the time we were hired the situation had gotten really bad. The few pots and pans he owned were caked with grease and food remnants, his clothes and bedding reeked, and there was a visible layer of dust on every one of the thousands of books he had crammed into his small study.
He had managed to prevent anyone he loved from ever seeing this until, suddenly, he had no choice. He could not come home until the place was deemed suitable for him, and he would need a caregiver to stay with him. Home healthcare agencies will not send caregivers into homes like this because they are not safe or healthy work environments. Dan had appointed his father to be his power of attorney, so his father hired us to clean up his apartment.
As my staff bagged all his clothes to be cleaned and boxed up all his old magazine for discarding, I imagined Dan’s anger and embarrassment at suddenly having his home dismantled, cleaned, and re-assembled by complete strangers.
There is no way to predict when or if any of us will be taken ill. But I am sure, when Dan looks back, he regrets not putting his things in order. If his apartment had been uncluttered and tidy, his family would not have had to get as deeply involved as they did. He is home now. He is furious about some of the things that were discarded, but at least he is home.
If you are a private person like Dan, you may want to put a plan in place for how you want your things handled if you become incapacitated or die. It is not a bad idea to put together instructions in your will. You can even specify a few companies that you would trust to sort your things, and you can specify that your family not be involved. If you don’t do so, the courts will naturally turn to them first.
If you don’t designate someone as your power of attorney (something we should all do as soon as we are adults), then your state will follow a formal process of deciding who this should be. It could be a parent, or a child, for example. If you have other, non-relatives, who you would trust more to understand your wishes, you should designate them legally now.
You might consider putting into writing that your executor or power of attorney hire someone from an organization like the National Association of Senior Move Managers (of which we are a proud member), for example, or the National Association of Professional Organizers. The key is to specify these things now, before it is too late.
