The Weight of the Stuff We Keep: A Look at Hoarding Disorder
Just a few months before my father died, I walked into his office and felt a sense of horror at the chaotic stacks of books, Amazon boxes, power tools, computer gear and stuff that had become part of his daily environment. It didn't always look like this. But over time, it had become disordered, messy, dangerous. I knew that my father was suffering from being overwhelmed by a lot of aspects of life, but he was not a man that could ever verbally share his feelings and experiences. Instead, his hoarded office, a room that I felt indicated his potential for a much bigger hoard, became a mirror for his sense of overwhelm. He passed away in the first half of 2025, and since then, I have spent a long time learning about, researching, and understanding hoarding tendencies and hoarding disorder. Oddly enough, in late 2023 I was writing a new novel manuscript about a fictional father who had died trapped by his own collection of stuff. That prophetic manuscript went on to become Our Lord of the Flowers, my eighth published book (paperback drops in 2026). And thus, this chaotic tendency toward collecting things that all humans have has become an are of my creative and personal focus.
In my own life, and in the fictional world of Our Lord of the Flowers, the physical objects we accumulate are rarely just "stuff." They can become anchors that can weigh a person down. In more serious or clinical cases, they can also become a life-threatening danger, primarily for the owner of those objects, but also to their family.
What is Hoarding Disorder?
Clinical hoarding is way more than a messy room or a collection gone overboard. According to the DSM-5, it is a persistent difficulty discarding possessions, regardless of their actual value. This leads to a level of accumulation that congests living areas and compromises the intended use of a home.
In their seminal book Stuff, authors Randy Frost and Gail Steketee—whose work was a vital compass for me—describe it as a struggle with decision-making and a deep emotional attachment to the "potential" of objects. I read Stuff earlier this year, and it was an incredible piece of non-fiction that helped me work on the book Our Lord of the Flowers.
The Hidden Numbers
It is a quiet epidemic. Estimates suggest that 2% to 6% of Americans suffer from hoarding disorder. That means millions of people are living behind barricades of paper, plastic, and memory, often in profound isolation.
The Inherited Burden: Children of Hoarders
In Our Lord of the Flowers, Sir Vitrum, my protagonist, doesn't just face a messy house left behind by his father; he faces the "Children of Hoarders" reality. In the book, the house itself is a danger. It is piled high with objects, trash, vermin and their feces. For the family members involved in the book, the disorder creates a specific type of secondary trauma that is not easy to recover from.
Growing up with a loved one who has these hoarding tendencies (I am very careful to not diagnose my own father but instead express my experience of him) often means living with a "secret." It means the house is a place of shame rather than sanctuary. When the child of a hoarder finally has to clear the home, they aren't just moving boxes—they are performing a forced archaeology of their parents' unhealed wounds.
Hoarding as Frozen Trauma
In my estimation, facing a hoard means facing the family's past and its generational trauma. In the pages of Our Lord of the Flowers, that generational trauma goes way back in time, to the genocide and horrors of the colonization of the Americas, but also through other traumas, like poverty, substance dependency, and emotional neglect. As the author of this novel, I can see a lot of life mirrored in the characters. We don't hold onto a broken toaster because we need toast; we hold onto it because we are afraid of the loss it represents.
"We don't hold onto a broken toaster because we need toast; we hold onto it because we are afraid of the loss it represents."
A hoard is often trauma made visible. It is a way of "insulating" oneself against a world that has been unkind. Whether it's grief, poverty, or a sudden loss of identity, the items become a buffer between the person and their pain.
From the Collyers to Langley
We see the extreme version of this in the legendary story of the Collyer brothers, who were found in 1947 in a Harlem brownstone filled with 140 tons of debris. Their story—masterfully fictionalized in E.L. Doctorow’s Homer and Langley—serves as a haunting reminder of how easily a person can be swallowed by their own history. I also read Homer and Langley as part of my research for Our Lord of the Flowers, and it helped me immensely.
Why This Matters for the Story
I chose to give my Sir Vitrum's father in my novel hoarding disorder because I wanted to explore the courage it takes to dig through the wreckage of a life. I wanted to show how painful it can be for family members to try to piece together a puzzle that will always have incomplete pieces. And I also wanted to express ideas about consumerism, capitalism, and the way that they work against principles of indigenous cultures that were almost erased by European colonizers. In Our Lord of the Flowers, the act of clearing the hoard is the only way for the protagonist to finally see his father clearly—and to free himself from the weight of what was left behind.