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

(Hardback)

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An unexpected inheritance leads to a shocking house of hoarding and a year-long question to understand the deep connection between humans and their objects.

I am a detective of the deceased as in my hands, their possessions bring my departed relatives to life. As I separate significant items from garbage, I am able to peel apart and expose the emotional underpinnings of hoarding and make sense of the difference between collecting and hoarding. There are recognized genetic connections to hoarding and these take me inward to question my own behavior. By combing through their possessions, I discover the truth about my relatives, their human natures, the family secrets they hid. With each revelation my preconceived judgments progressively shift from disgust at the detritus, what I see as the flotsam of lives, to feelings of empathy. I learn how after death, each of us continues to live in the items we have possessed.

As wide-ranging as genealogical discoveries can be, they do not usually lead to a year-long immersion inside the House of a Hoarder. Yet that is what happened to me. Its Always A Secret brings a reader into the world inhabited by an estimated 19 million Americans who are hoarders, many unseen, fearful of humiliation if their secret is revealed. Although I was aware of the widespread existence of hoarding behavior, especially since the A&E television series Hoarders has had 13 seasons, from 2009 to 2021 (and may have a possible Season 14). I had never considered that this behavior would interest or touch me, thought I did not know any hoarders, and I could never become one. I was wrong.

In researching family history in 2017 my sister Ellen learns that our first cousin Bob had died in 2016 at age 67. She knows that she, my brothers, and I are the next of kin but none of us had been notified. A little more research shows that Bob had not had a funeral until six months after he had passed away. (There is an aura of mystery in this fact which we eventually solve.) We are able to document our status as surviving family and in 2017 when I enter the Cherry Hill, New Jersey home that Bob left behind, and we inherited, I discover rooms filled wall to wall, floor to ceiling, with piled up items from years of secret hoarding, but also the disciplined collecting, of clocks, glassware, Asian porcelain pieces, toy trains and more. During my year in this house, from 2017-2018, I learn the truth of my grandparents marriage through documents found. I begin to understand the link between people and their possessions. Like a Sherlock Holmes of the emotions, I feel the lives of others in the objects they held close and were unable to discard. A new empathy wells up within me and I realize that objects actually bring their owners to life in my hands.

Reviews

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. -- Sheila Weller * Author of Girls Like Us; Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon---and the Journey of a Generation *

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.
Michael A. Tompkins, PhD, ABPP

-- Michael A. Tompkins, PhD, ABPP * Digging Out: Helping Your Loved One Manage Clutter, Hoarding, and Compulsive Acquiring *
Why cant 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 homeshe steps into a hidden world thick with dust and silence. Batteries, Nutcracker dolls, model train magazinesthese arent just forgotten objects. Theyre fragments of lives, locked in time. As Stukane navigates the hoarded rooms of her familys 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. -- David Zinczenko * #1 New York Times bestselling author of Zero Belly Diet and the co-author of the Eat This, Not That! *

Author Bio

Eileen Stukane is a freelance reporter for Chelsea Community News.com and a writer for NextTribe. Her editorial experience includes positions as a staff writer at Self and a features editor of Cosmopolitan. Eileen is the author of Running on Two Different Tracks and The Dream Worlds of Pregnancy and has written major articles related to womens health for Cosmopolitan, Harper's Bazaar, Glamour, Ladies' Home Journal, The Daily News, The New York Post, and numerous other national publications. She lives in New York City. Read more about Eileen and her work at www.eileenstukane.com.