The House That Held Everything: A Family's Hidden Hoarding and the Secrets Left Behind

An unexpected inheritance leads to a shocking house of hoarding and a year-long quest to understand the deep connection between humans and their objects. The possessions of her departed relatives come alive in her hands, as author Eileen Stukane becomes a detective of the deceased in The House That Held Everything. In this first-person memoir, the author inherits the childhood home of a deceased cousin, and then opens a door to rooms filled wall to wall, floor to ceiling, with piled up items from years of secret hoarding, as well as from the disciplined collecting, of clocks, glassware, Asian porcelain, toy trains and more. As she separates significant items from garbage, she peels apart and exposes the emotional underpinnings of hoarding, and makes sense of the difference between collecting and hoarding.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Chapter 1 -- A Key Opens Locked-In Lives Chapter 2 -- Uncle Mike Keeps Time (For Himself) Chapter 3 -- Aunt Marie Reflected In Glass And Porcelain Chapter 4 -- Peter And His Paperweights Chapter 5 -- Bob's Christmas Every Day Chapter 6 -- Effie And Jacob: Family Secrets Revealed Chapter 7 -- Objects Tell Unspoken Stories Chapter 8 -- What I Did With All That Stuff Chapter 9 -- When Someone You Love Compulsively Hoards Epilogue Closing The Door And Burying Bob Resources Bibliography About the Author

About the Author :
Eileen Stukane, an award-winning journalist in New York City, enters the world of hoarding disorder in The House That Held Everything. She has covered women's health and family stories as the author of The Dream Worlds of Pregnancy, co-author of four women's health books, among them Listen To Your Body, and as a contributor to national publications. Here she focuses on the mysterious and deep connection between humans and their objects.

Review :
Eileen Stukane's heart-in-throat account of entering the toxic hell of her deceased cousin's floor-to-ceiling-cluttered, stench-emanating house -- which she had once known as elegant and orderly -- is the beginning of a mystery that she probes and solves in this exquisite, un-put-down-able book. She and her sister Ellen go through every one of the thousands of items in the house: discarding, appraising, sifting the gold from the dross: a herculean, heartful task that took a full year. What makes a hoarder? What clues exist in the house, hidden under the thousands of "dust-blanketed, hard-to-identify objects" that preserve memories of her aunt, uncle and two cousins? What does one do when one finds a hoarder in one's midst? She takes on the pathology of this disorder -- with empathy, stringence, and love. Eileen Stukane has written a thoughtful and sensitive memoir that is a cautionary tale of unbridled attachment to objects. Over the course of a year, she and her sister cleared the hoarded home of a loved one. In the process she uncovered and then discovered what lay beneath the mountains of stuff: isolation, loneliness, and suffering. Why can't you let go of that old, chipped mug? What hold does it have on you? And why do those worn shirts, long past their prime, feel impossible to give away? In The House That Held Everything, Eileen Stukane inherits more than a home-she steps into a hidden world thick with dust and silence. Batteries, Nutcracker dolls, model train magazines-these aren't just forgotten objects. They're fragments of lives, locked in time. As Stukane navigates the hoarded rooms of her family's past, she becomes a kind of forensic soul-searcher, who uncovers buried truths one artifact at a time. What begins as a simple inheritance unravels into a haunting exploration of memory, identity, and the things we hold onto without knowing why, until now...the powerful bond between people and their possessions fills the air in The House That Held Everything. We often hear that we live in a 'throw-away-society'. This book reminds us of the other extreme of consumer society: when collecting becomes hoarding. A moving account of the comfort and pain of things and what their accumulation reveals about a family's secrets.