As Diseases Sneaked Up on Woman, the Piles of Clutter Grew

Joyce Dopkeen/The New York Times

Before Katherine Gamble sought professional help, her piles of clothing and books had taken over five rooms in her home.


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By JENNIFER 8. LEE
Published: January 16, 2008

She simply shut the door. Maybe that would keep everything inside. The debris. The anxieties. The worn furniture. The sadness. The stacks of yellowing papers. The tangle of once-fine clothes. The jumble of interwoven memories of a life past. If she shut the door, it would all be hidden away, and she wouldn’t have to confront It — whatever It was.
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But Katherine Gamble soon discovered that the door could not contain her depression or its physical manifestation. The haphazard piles soon spilled out of the bedroom into the rest of her elegant Hamilton Heights apartment, where even the French doors could not keep them at bay. And so her world shrank. Where she could walk, where she could sit, where she could be by herself — all that was eroded by the encroaching waves of clutter. It filled two bedrooms, the library, the kitchen and the bathroom. Soon there was only the living room left, if only because her mother had emphasized to her to make sure to have a place for guests to sit.

Ms. Gamble could not throw anything out. Her apartment became an archaeological study of a life in decline. There was the houndstooth-check jacket purchased from Lord & Taylor, from her days working as a computer trainer on Wall Street. Houndstooth is coming back, Ms. Gamble thought to herself. There was an old vacuum cleaner and two dusty Persian rugs that cost $5,000. It took a long time to pay off those rugs. A rag doll named Molly, missing a sock, for a goddaughter who is now 27 years old. They never figured out where the sock went. A record player she had not used in 10 years because the needle was broken and she had not gotten around to replacing it.

Then there were the mounds of aging books: the African American encyclopedia from 1979, an echo of her college days at Cornell University, when she was a fresh-faced girl from Detroit; “Love in the Time of Cholera” by Gabriel García Márquez; Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. She had loved books since her third-grade teacher, Mrs. Van Vleck, gave her a volume of fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm that was so big her arms could not carry it.

But she can no longer read; her diabetes has affected her eyesight. She cries when she thinks about her books.

Seven years ago, Ms. Gamble sank into depression around the time she and her husband divorced. As her health declined, she was hit with strokes in 2006 and 2007, leaving her able to move only her head. The second one left her with aphasia, a form of brain damage that makes it hard for her to understand numbers.

“I can’t remember my phone number or my date of birth,” said Ms. Gamble, now 50. “But I have been practicing. I have those things written down in my pocket.”

The aphasia means she also cannot make her famed banana pudding — which she learned to make at age 8 from her Aunt Eunice — because of all the measurements involved.

“The concept of how much is a half a cup is way past what I want to figure out,” she said.

She was in a nursing home from February to June of 2007 because of the second stroke. When she returned home, the clutter was still there. The doctors tended to her diabetes, her aphasia and her dialysis. A home aide makes sure she takes her confetti-colored set of daily medication. But what Ms. Gamble really needed was a decluttering service, decided the social workers from the Service Program for Older People, a member agency of the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies, one of the seven beneficiary agencies of The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund.

Over two weeks in July, workers came four times. They went through the apartment, piece by piece. There was so much refuse that they had to make special arrangements with the Sanitation Department to haul it all away. Ms. Gamble has her apartment back. The total cost, paid for by the Neediest Cases Fund: $1,050.

And the workers were sensitive enough to save the most precious of her memories, Ms. Gamble said. “They didn’t throw away my pictures.”