Piling Up
photographs by Julia Delmedico
Savers — Waipahu, HI / Honolulu, HI — May 13, 2022 — $227.47
My uncle takes us to two locations of his favorite thrift store. I try things on at hyperspeed over the spandex shorts and sports bra I have worn explicitly for this purpose. I buy: a white linen button-up decorated with hand-drawn tropical huts; a navy blue linen button-up with vine-like floral stripes; a woven cotton tee with a pattern that reminds me of ancient cave drawings; a striped sweater dress the feels like something a Scooby-Doo character would wear; a tapestry-style floral jacket embarrassingly similar to one I already own; and a suitcase to bring it all back in.
* * *
Thrifting requires patience. You can’t just walk into a thrift store and casually browse—not if you want to find anything good. It’s a systematic process, one which requires a multi-hour block. I take things rack by rack, my right hand lingering on each hanger as I decide whether the article of clothing is worthy of my interest, snaking my way through the aisles in fastidious increments to preserve energy.
There is an achy, sickly feeling you get after thrifting for too long. If that feeling sets in before you’ve gotten to the fitting rooms, your haul is doomed. You will end up hating everything you try on, hating the way your body looks in it, the way it feels on you.
At Thrift Town, the enormous two story Mecca in San Francisco where I learned to shop second hand, I would arrive at the dressing rooms with a heavy basket piled high with fabrics of all colors and textures. I would spend hours in those tiny stalls, avoiding eye contact with the members of the growing line, waiting for me to vacate as I swapped out garments, cross-referencing prices and sale tags, gradually whittling my pile down. By the time I left and called my mom to pick me up, I’d be holding an enormous plastic bag the size of a small bean bag chair.
As with most women, my mom is the person who taught me how to shop. Only, as an ex-hippie who never wore makeup and criticized my sister and I when we did—she did so while reminding us of the frivolity and vanity of material things; instilling in us a distaste for the “overpriced.” Things were worth more if they cost less. We were comfortably middle class, but my mom was always stingy with money—a trait she’d inherited from her mom, who had grown up in the Great Depression and died well before I was born.
But it wasn’t until we started frequenting Thrift Town that I fell in love with shopping. With thrifting, the euphoria of a good deal was magnified by the knowledge that no one else at school—or maybe anywhere in the world —would have the same thing I did. The more unique the garment, the more powerful I felt. I could make myself cooler, better, more interesting by wearing boldly patterned sweaters from the 80s, all while remaining on some imagined moral high ground. My mom praised me for my frugality; strangers complimented my outfits. If someone asked me where I got something, I could smugly tell them that I had thrifted it… and it had only cost two dollars. The closest thing to religious ecstasy I have ever felt is the feeling I get when I shop: the bliss of discovery, of finding that perfect thing that you simply cannot live without, that you must be seen in.
* * *
Los Feliz Flea — Los Angeles, CA — Aug. 13, 2022 — $289
My friend Sadie and I, one of the few people I’ve met who can match my shopping endurance, spend the afternoon going stall to stall, trying things on in makeshift dressing rooms. Between 10 different vendors, I buy: a black sleeveless duster; a sheer spandex top I can barely move in; an oat-colored rayon button-up; a crocheted green-and-white checkered bucket hat; a frilly pink long-sleeved dress from the 80’s that makes me feel like Kate Bush; two patterned sundresses vintage dresses; and a 2-piece polyester suit.
Throughout college and my early-to-mid 20s, I shopped exclusively at thrift stores, flea markets, and secondhand shops – the layover rule from my mother that I “did not buy clothing new” a point of pride only buoyed by an education on the ethical failings of the fashion industry. I’d found a loophole, a secret passageway to guilt-free indulgence. I was able to feed the cravings of my growing addiction without any significant financial consequences or ethical hang-ups. If I was having a bad day, I could go to Goodwill and emerge in a good mood, with a fresh sense of optimism.
I bought clothes faster than I could get rid of them, all the while telling myself that I was a collector. That one day soon I’d own a proper walk-in-closet in a proper house to keep my reserves In the meantime, though, my actual apartment-sized closet was overflowing. In an attempt to reconcile the problem, every January, I would empty the contents of my closet and dresser onto my bed, piled into one huge, teetering mound that stretched toward the ceiling, and begin the days-long process of sorting through which garments I actually wanted to wear.
One of these Januarys, as I worked through the pile, I called my mom and told her about my new ritual of purging. I thought she could get something out of it,, as she was always checking out self-help books about mindfulness and decluttering from the library. Ironically, when I visited home, I would see them piled by the door, unfinished but due to be returned. She’d had trouble finishing books for a while now.
* * *
ThredUp — Online — May 2022 to Jun. 2023 — $1202.26
During the pandemic, I begin shopping on ThredUp, an enormous but poorly designed online thrift store. I spend days combing through hundreds of pages of clothing, using tricks to cut through the infinite sprawl of cheap, discarded fast fashion. I buy: a black-and-white asymmetrical lightweight linen jacket; a vintage clowncore “dry clean only” floral jacket; checkered Urban Renewal flare leggings; a shiny Vince bias-cut silk skirt; my favorite pair of checkered X-Girl cargo jeans I hardly ever wear; a pink Lands End puffer jacket; and a bucket hat that turns out to be for a child’s head.
* * *
When I tell people my mom was a hoarder, they laugh and say, “Oh my god, me too. She still has all the terrible art I made for her when I was a kid.” And I have to explain that, no, my mom was an actual hoarder. “Like on the TV show?” they ask. Yes, like on the TV show.
Then I go into detail: up until a few years ago, my childhood home was storage grounds for every single newspaper and New Yorker magazine that had been delivered to its address since my parents moved there in 1993; every printout, every flyer, every piece of mail that had enough white space left on it to be used as “scrap paper” for “taking notes”; at least three thousand dollars in brand new Costco purchases my mom had meant to return but “hadn’t gotten around to.” In each room were various items of furniture my mother had scavenged from the street and then unceremoniously forgotten about, arts-and-craft supplies of all pedigrees, including the sticks from popsicles I had eaten in 1998, saved for some indeterminate future art project. But most of all, there were boxes. Piled haphazardly on top of each other, salvaged from the Costco checkout line and saved to store the junk that my mom would, on some unspecified day, go through.
That day never came. My mom passed away last June, finally succumbing to the Lewy body dementia that had spent the two years prior (and likely many years before those, though we didn’t know it yet) immobilizing her body and mind.
Lewy body dementia, in oversimplified terms, is essentially dementia plus Parkinson’s. Early on, my mom’s issues were less with memory than they were with comprehension. She had trouble focusing on anything and complained of a constant brain fog. She would forget the words for things and be unable to communicate the thoughts in her head, eventually leading to a total breakdown in language. She forgot how to do basic physical tasks like eating, going to the bathroom, and walking. Things she saw everyday were suddenly unfamiliar hallucinations. “Was this really her bedroom?” she’d ask as I walked her to her bed. The last to go were the motor functions. A person can live with Alzheimer’s for years and still be relatively functional, but less than half a year after her diagnosis my mom needed constant, around-the-clock care.
I never had a great relationship with my mom. We were both “too stubborn for our own good,” as my dad put it, which is a tactful way of saying that most of our interactions amounted to psychological warfare. My mom was a difficult person to live with, let alone be raised by. Everything had to be done her way. We each had our own separate hand towels in the bathroom, including separate towels for any guests who would be instructed prior to their first bathroom trip not to use any of our towels. My sister and I were required to make detailed packing lists subject to her approval before any trip, though, due to her last-minute nature and need for unnecessary supplies, we’d regularly be 8 hours late..
She was very intelligent, but not always rational. Her mind followed its own internal logic, convinced that everyone was out to get her. She could make you feel guilty about the tiniest things, and she did it so subtly that I still find it difficult to put it into words. If a fight on a family drive got bad enough, she would pull over, get out of the car, and walk away into the darkness, down the shoulder of the highway, into the middle of nowhere.
As a child, I felt trapped in my mom’s house, amid her vast piles of junk and acute scrutiny. But as an adult I’m able to zoom out, see the mother who hoarded and criticized and micromanaged before her. See the victim and perpetrator rolled into one. Everything seemed out of her control: she had lost years of her life to drinking, given up a career she couldn’t get back now, and alienated the people closest to her. Hoarding gave her an artificial sense of control—a level of control she could only have over inanimate objects, never people, because objects couldn’t fight back. This was another habit she had learned from her mother.
This was never more apparent than on the 2021 November weekend that my sister, cousin, and I spent sorting through a long-forgotten storage unit in Redlands. I never knew my grandma Millie, my mom’s mom; she died prematurely at 58 from a cancer that would have been treatable had she been willing to go to a doctor, and I don’t think my mom ever forgave her for that. I was curious to see what she had left behind.
What we found inside that Extra Space Storage unit was a distressingly familiar sight: boxes piled upon boxes, mildewed by time and rotted with water damage, reaching almost to the top of the 6-foot ceiling. My grandmother, it turned out, had hoarded kitchenware: bowls, kettles, carafes, egg cups, milk jugs, serving platters, entire dinnerware sets, frying pans, casserole dishes. She had written on everything, annotating books and filing away notecards, cramming the spare corners of old mail with to-do lists like the ones my mom had kept on her computer, full of tasks she was never able to complete. Like archaeologists in the desert sun, we sorted through the relics of her life until the sky grew dark and our bodies ached, sticky with sweat and the filth of lost decades.
The only other time I had done something like this was in November 2019, exactly two years prior— before my mom’s dementia diagnosis. Things had gotten so bad that there was no longer a place to stay in the house; my tiny childhood twin bed buried so deep under boxes that it was completely inaccessible. My sister and I prepared to confront our mom about her hoarding and begin the process of clearing out the house by brute force. We figured we would start small: if it was mostly our old things we were getting rid of, she wouldn’t be able to object. Right?
Day after day, our mother broke down, lashed out, as if every object thrown away was an organ we had ripped out of her body. Through tears, I screamed back , accusing her of 26 years of emotional abuse. She crumpled into a pile. Tears streaming from her eyes in disbelief that she had, in some way, become her own mother. The next day, I drove back to LA, unsure if I would ever speak to my mother again.
* * *
Various Small Brands — Los Angeles, CA & Online — Nov. 2021 to Jun. 2023— $5,402.26
I become enamored with the notion of ethical and sustainable production, brands like Pact, Samantha Pleet, and Everlane. I have never spent large sums of money on individual items before, but I tell myself I am doing a good thing by supporting “ethical” business. I spend an entire month’s rent on alt-kitsch clown clothes from the ironically named Fashion Brand Company. I buy: a ¾-sleeve sweater decorated with 3-dimensional nipples; a neon green pleather hat adorned with foot-long fringe around the brim, a black velvet mini-dress with draping sleeves that read “YES” and “NO” when you raise your arms; and an entire outfit that looks like Swiss cheese. I have never received more compliments on my clothing.
* * *
After the dementia diagnosis, my mom’s condition deteriorated faster than any of us had anticipated. It became obvious that she would not be able to stay at home much longer if we didn’t do something about the house. The labyrinthine piles of newspapers had become a tripping hazard for her Parkinsonian stutter-step shuffle walk; the piled boxes made it nearly impossible for caregivers to help her navigate from her bedroom to the bathroom and kitchen.
When my dad first told me he had hired Ingrid to begin the process of clearing out the house—and that mom had actually agreed to it—I felt bitter. Yes, I was grateful that something was finally going to be done,.but only two years prior, I had poured my entire being—every last fiber of optimism I had about my relationship with my mom—into cleaning and it had ended in disaster. But her diagnosis left no room for resentment. My mom would never get better, only worse. There’d be no closure except letting go.
It was no use fighting with her anymore. Her logical reasoning was gone, and she no longer had the ability to understand what we were fighting about, only that we were fighting and I was angry with her.
Dementia thrusts you into grief while the person you are grieving is still alive; parts of them disappearing before the whole. I helped her go to the bathroom, changed her clothes, hoisted her in and out of bed, coaxed her to eat more than a couple bites, made sure she took her pills, took her for agonizingly slow walks, shorter and shorter in length by the day.
Every month or so I would go back to visit and the space would be a little bit clearer. It was as if the worse my mom did, the cleaner the house got; the clutter stripped from the floors and reappearing in her mind..
Ingrid worked tirelessly: full shifts spent sifting through every corner of the house from the attic to the garage. She filled our recycle bin to the brim every week, as well any available space in the recycle bins of several generous and understanding neighbors. She and my dad made Goodwill trip after Goodwill trip to drop off whatever had been uncovered from the depths that week. For two decades prior to the diagnoses, my dad had been cut off from the world by mom’s hoarding, unable to have friends over, living full-time in a house so filthy it gave most visitors violent allergy attacks. “My savior,” he called Ingrid. It was grief mixed with relief.
At the end, my mom could hardly get up from her bed, even with help. Tiny meals became no meals at all; a few bottles of Ensure became a few sips. Friends visited, and she gave them what little attention she could. Her body had grown skeletal, and so had the house. It was like a memory of a place I had once known, in the haze of childhood, when everything seemed so big and full of life. Now it felt barren and small.
When I visited at the beginning of May 2023, my dad had just made the decision to call in hospice. While my mom slept, we went through old boxes together: childhood photos, uncovered treasures from the garage. We unearthed my mom’s wedding dress from a dark, dusty recess of their closet—accessible for the first time in decades. It was well-preserved in a sealed box. Unlike most of her old clothing, which fit me perfectly, I could barely get the zipper on.
When I needed alone time, I would retreat to my parents’ now-abandoned bedroom and scroll on ThredUp. It gave me an objective, a constant moving goalpost to pursue.There would always be more clothes to discover and add to my favorites. Hidden gems, valuable pieces that had slipped through the cracks of the poorly designed inventory process and been listed for a price so low it could only be a mistake. While shopping, I could visualize my future with each item: the outfits, the occasions, the way they would look on my body.
* * *
My parents’ house — San Francisco, CA — June 9, 2023 — $0
Sometime around the crack of dawn, I awake to find my mother’s body cold. I shake my dad, snoring softly in the twin bed a few feet away. “Dad, wake up. She’s gone.” We have been waiting for this to happen for nearly a week now. Later that day, people bring brownies and say how sorry they are. I cry a lot, but mostly just when I think about how cold she was, how pale. I am surprised by the overwhelming feeling of relief. Later, after people leave, I begin to pick through her dresser and closet. I feel like a vulture, but I want to keep her things. To wear her clothes on my body. I am the exact same size that my mom was before the dementia and before she started drinking. Nearly all her clothing fits me perfectly. I take: her favorite Hardly Strictly Bluegrass sweatshirt, a black zip-up with a Golden Gate Bridge design; her UCSC t-shirt with the bespectacled banana slug mascot I remember her wearing a lot when I was little; a polka dot blouse-and-skirt set she must have worn to the office, back when she still worked; the rayon satin jacket she used to wear to cousins’ weddings and bar mitzvahs; several Hawaiian-style sundresses that conjure memories of eating shave ice in the warm Kauai sun; and various sweaters, blouses, and pants from Cut Loose, a favorite San Francisco mom brand. There is so much to choose from, a lifetime of clothing suddenly without an owner. I take only what I know I will treasure. Even so, I wonder how I will fit it all in my closet.
My uncle takes us to two locations of his favorite thrift store. I try things on at hyperspeed over the spandex shorts and sports bra I have worn explicitly for this purpose. I buy: a white linen button-up decorated with hand-drawn tropical huts; a navy blue linen button-up with vine-like floral stripes; a woven cotton tee with a pattern that reminds me of ancient cave drawings; a striped sweater dress the feels like something a Scooby-Doo character would wear; a tapestry-style floral jacket embarrassingly similar to one I already own; and a suitcase to bring it all back in.
* * *
Thrifting requires patience. You can’t just walk into a thrift store and casually browse—not if you want to find anything good. It’s a systematic process, one which requires a multi-hour block. I take things rack by rack, my right hand lingering on each hanger as I decide whether the article of clothing is worthy of my interest, snaking my way through the aisles in fastidious increments to preserve energy.
There is an achy, sickly feeling you get after thrifting for too long. If that feeling sets in before you’ve gotten to the fitting rooms, your haul is doomed. You will end up hating everything you try on, hating the way your body looks in it, the way it feels on you.
At Thrift Town, the enormous two story Mecca in San Francisco where I learned to shop second hand, I would arrive at the dressing rooms with a heavy basket piled high with fabrics of all colors and textures. I would spend hours in those tiny stalls, avoiding eye contact with the members of the growing line, waiting for me to vacate as I swapped out garments, cross-referencing prices and sale tags, gradually whittling my pile down. By the time I left and called my mom to pick me up, I’d be holding an enormous plastic bag the size of a small bean bag chair.
As with most women, my mom is the person who taught me how to shop. Only, as an ex-hippie who never wore makeup and criticized my sister and I when we did—she did so while reminding us of the frivolity and vanity of material things; instilling in us a distaste for the “overpriced.” Things were worth more if they cost less. We were comfortably middle class, but my mom was always stingy with money—a trait she’d inherited from her mom, who had grown up in the Great Depression and died well before I was born.
But it wasn’t until we started frequenting Thrift Town that I fell in love with shopping. With thrifting, the euphoria of a good deal was magnified by the knowledge that no one else at school—or maybe anywhere in the world —would have the same thing I did. The more unique the garment, the more powerful I felt. I could make myself cooler, better, more interesting by wearing boldly patterned sweaters from the 80s, all while remaining on some imagined moral high ground. My mom praised me for my frugality; strangers complimented my outfits. If someone asked me where I got something, I could smugly tell them that I had thrifted it… and it had only cost two dollars. The closest thing to religious ecstasy I have ever felt is the feeling I get when I shop: the bliss of discovery, of finding that perfect thing that you simply cannot live without, that you must be seen in.
* * *
Los Feliz Flea — Los Angeles, CA — Aug. 13, 2022 — $289
My friend Sadie and I, one of the few people I’ve met who can match my shopping endurance, spend the afternoon going stall to stall, trying things on in makeshift dressing rooms. Between 10 different vendors, I buy: a black sleeveless duster; a sheer spandex top I can barely move in; an oat-colored rayon button-up; a crocheted green-and-white checkered bucket hat; a frilly pink long-sleeved dress from the 80’s that makes me feel like Kate Bush; two patterned sundresses vintage dresses; and a 2-piece polyester suit.
Throughout college and my early-to-mid 20s, I shopped exclusively at thrift stores, flea markets, and secondhand shops – the layover rule from my mother that I “did not buy clothing new” a point of pride only buoyed by an education on the ethical failings of the fashion industry. I’d found a loophole, a secret passageway to guilt-free indulgence. I was able to feed the cravings of my growing addiction without any significant financial consequences or ethical hang-ups. If I was having a bad day, I could go to Goodwill and emerge in a good mood, with a fresh sense of optimism.
I bought clothes faster than I could get rid of them, all the while telling myself that I was a collector. That one day soon I’d own a proper walk-in-closet in a proper house to keep my reserves In the meantime, though, my actual apartment-sized closet was overflowing. In an attempt to reconcile the problem, every January, I would empty the contents of my closet and dresser onto my bed, piled into one huge, teetering mound that stretched toward the ceiling, and begin the days-long process of sorting through which garments I actually wanted to wear.
One of these Januarys, as I worked through the pile, I called my mom and told her about my new ritual of purging. I thought she could get something out of it,, as she was always checking out self-help books about mindfulness and decluttering from the library. Ironically, when I visited home, I would see them piled by the door, unfinished but due to be returned. She’d had trouble finishing books for a while now.
* * *
ThredUp — Online — May 2022 to Jun. 2023 — $1202.26
During the pandemic, I begin shopping on ThredUp, an enormous but poorly designed online thrift store. I spend days combing through hundreds of pages of clothing, using tricks to cut through the infinite sprawl of cheap, discarded fast fashion. I buy: a black-and-white asymmetrical lightweight linen jacket; a vintage clowncore “dry clean only” floral jacket; checkered Urban Renewal flare leggings; a shiny Vince bias-cut silk skirt; my favorite pair of checkered X-Girl cargo jeans I hardly ever wear; a pink Lands End puffer jacket; and a bucket hat that turns out to be for a child’s head.
* * *
When I tell people my mom was a hoarder, they laugh and say, “Oh my god, me too. She still has all the terrible art I made for her when I was a kid.” And I have to explain that, no, my mom was an actual hoarder. “Like on the TV show?” they ask. Yes, like on the TV show.
Then I go into detail: up until a few years ago, my childhood home was storage grounds for every single newspaper and New Yorker magazine that had been delivered to its address since my parents moved there in 1993; every printout, every flyer, every piece of mail that had enough white space left on it to be used as “scrap paper” for “taking notes”; at least three thousand dollars in brand new Costco purchases my mom had meant to return but “hadn’t gotten around to.” In each room were various items of furniture my mother had scavenged from the street and then unceremoniously forgotten about, arts-and-craft supplies of all pedigrees, including the sticks from popsicles I had eaten in 1998, saved for some indeterminate future art project. But most of all, there were boxes. Piled haphazardly on top of each other, salvaged from the Costco checkout line and saved to store the junk that my mom would, on some unspecified day, go through.
That day never came. My mom passed away last June, finally succumbing to the Lewy body dementia that had spent the two years prior (and likely many years before those, though we didn’t know it yet) immobilizing her body and mind.
Lewy body dementia, in oversimplified terms, is essentially dementia plus Parkinson’s. Early on, my mom’s issues were less with memory than they were with comprehension. She had trouble focusing on anything and complained of a constant brain fog. She would forget the words for things and be unable to communicate the thoughts in her head, eventually leading to a total breakdown in language. She forgot how to do basic physical tasks like eating, going to the bathroom, and walking. Things she saw everyday were suddenly unfamiliar hallucinations. “Was this really her bedroom?” she’d ask as I walked her to her bed. The last to go were the motor functions. A person can live with Alzheimer’s for years and still be relatively functional, but less than half a year after her diagnosis my mom needed constant, around-the-clock care.
I never had a great relationship with my mom. We were both “too stubborn for our own good,” as my dad put it, which is a tactful way of saying that most of our interactions amounted to psychological warfare. My mom was a difficult person to live with, let alone be raised by. Everything had to be done her way. We each had our own separate hand towels in the bathroom, including separate towels for any guests who would be instructed prior to their first bathroom trip not to use any of our towels. My sister and I were required to make detailed packing lists subject to her approval before any trip, though, due to her last-minute nature and need for unnecessary supplies, we’d regularly be 8 hours late..
She was very intelligent, but not always rational. Her mind followed its own internal logic, convinced that everyone was out to get her. She could make you feel guilty about the tiniest things, and she did it so subtly that I still find it difficult to put it into words. If a fight on a family drive got bad enough, she would pull over, get out of the car, and walk away into the darkness, down the shoulder of the highway, into the middle of nowhere.
As a child, I felt trapped in my mom’s house, amid her vast piles of junk and acute scrutiny. But as an adult I’m able to zoom out, see the mother who hoarded and criticized and micromanaged before her. See the victim and perpetrator rolled into one. Everything seemed out of her control: she had lost years of her life to drinking, given up a career she couldn’t get back now, and alienated the people closest to her. Hoarding gave her an artificial sense of control—a level of control she could only have over inanimate objects, never people, because objects couldn’t fight back. This was another habit she had learned from her mother.
This was never more apparent than on the 2021 November weekend that my sister, cousin, and I spent sorting through a long-forgotten storage unit in Redlands. I never knew my grandma Millie, my mom’s mom; she died prematurely at 58 from a cancer that would have been treatable had she been willing to go to a doctor, and I don’t think my mom ever forgave her for that. I was curious to see what she had left behind.
What we found inside that Extra Space Storage unit was a distressingly familiar sight: boxes piled upon boxes, mildewed by time and rotted with water damage, reaching almost to the top of the 6-foot ceiling. My grandmother, it turned out, had hoarded kitchenware: bowls, kettles, carafes, egg cups, milk jugs, serving platters, entire dinnerware sets, frying pans, casserole dishes. She had written on everything, annotating books and filing away notecards, cramming the spare corners of old mail with to-do lists like the ones my mom had kept on her computer, full of tasks she was never able to complete. Like archaeologists in the desert sun, we sorted through the relics of her life until the sky grew dark and our bodies ached, sticky with sweat and the filth of lost decades.
The only other time I had done something like this was in November 2019, exactly two years prior— before my mom’s dementia diagnosis. Things had gotten so bad that there was no longer a place to stay in the house; my tiny childhood twin bed buried so deep under boxes that it was completely inaccessible. My sister and I prepared to confront our mom about her hoarding and begin the process of clearing out the house by brute force. We figured we would start small: if it was mostly our old things we were getting rid of, she wouldn’t be able to object. Right?
Day after day, our mother broke down, lashed out, as if every object thrown away was an organ we had ripped out of her body. Through tears, I screamed back , accusing her of 26 years of emotional abuse. She crumpled into a pile. Tears streaming from her eyes in disbelief that she had, in some way, become her own mother. The next day, I drove back to LA, unsure if I would ever speak to my mother again.
* * *
Various Small Brands — Los Angeles, CA & Online — Nov. 2021 to Jun. 2023— $5,402.26
I become enamored with the notion of ethical and sustainable production, brands like Pact, Samantha Pleet, and Everlane. I have never spent large sums of money on individual items before, but I tell myself I am doing a good thing by supporting “ethical” business. I spend an entire month’s rent on alt-kitsch clown clothes from the ironically named Fashion Brand Company. I buy: a ¾-sleeve sweater decorated with 3-dimensional nipples; a neon green pleather hat adorned with foot-long fringe around the brim, a black velvet mini-dress with draping sleeves that read “YES” and “NO” when you raise your arms; and an entire outfit that looks like Swiss cheese. I have never received more compliments on my clothing.
* * *
After the dementia diagnosis, my mom’s condition deteriorated faster than any of us had anticipated. It became obvious that she would not be able to stay at home much longer if we didn’t do something about the house. The labyrinthine piles of newspapers had become a tripping hazard for her Parkinsonian stutter-step shuffle walk; the piled boxes made it nearly impossible for caregivers to help her navigate from her bedroom to the bathroom and kitchen.
When my dad first told me he had hired Ingrid to begin the process of clearing out the house—and that mom had actually agreed to it—I felt bitter. Yes, I was grateful that something was finally going to be done,.but only two years prior, I had poured my entire being—every last fiber of optimism I had about my relationship with my mom—into cleaning and it had ended in disaster. But her diagnosis left no room for resentment. My mom would never get better, only worse. There’d be no closure except letting go.
It was no use fighting with her anymore. Her logical reasoning was gone, and she no longer had the ability to understand what we were fighting about, only that we were fighting and I was angry with her.
Dementia thrusts you into grief while the person you are grieving is still alive; parts of them disappearing before the whole. I helped her go to the bathroom, changed her clothes, hoisted her in and out of bed, coaxed her to eat more than a couple bites, made sure she took her pills, took her for agonizingly slow walks, shorter and shorter in length by the day.
Every month or so I would go back to visit and the space would be a little bit clearer. It was as if the worse my mom did, the cleaner the house got; the clutter stripped from the floors and reappearing in her mind..
Ingrid worked tirelessly: full shifts spent sifting through every corner of the house from the attic to the garage. She filled our recycle bin to the brim every week, as well any available space in the recycle bins of several generous and understanding neighbors. She and my dad made Goodwill trip after Goodwill trip to drop off whatever had been uncovered from the depths that week. For two decades prior to the diagnoses, my dad had been cut off from the world by mom’s hoarding, unable to have friends over, living full-time in a house so filthy it gave most visitors violent allergy attacks. “My savior,” he called Ingrid. It was grief mixed with relief.
At the end, my mom could hardly get up from her bed, even with help. Tiny meals became no meals at all; a few bottles of Ensure became a few sips. Friends visited, and she gave them what little attention she could. Her body had grown skeletal, and so had the house. It was like a memory of a place I had once known, in the haze of childhood, when everything seemed so big and full of life. Now it felt barren and small.
When I visited at the beginning of May 2023, my dad had just made the decision to call in hospice. While my mom slept, we went through old boxes together: childhood photos, uncovered treasures from the garage. We unearthed my mom’s wedding dress from a dark, dusty recess of their closet—accessible for the first time in decades. It was well-preserved in a sealed box. Unlike most of her old clothing, which fit me perfectly, I could barely get the zipper on.
When I needed alone time, I would retreat to my parents’ now-abandoned bedroom and scroll on ThredUp. It gave me an objective, a constant moving goalpost to pursue.There would always be more clothes to discover and add to my favorites. Hidden gems, valuable pieces that had slipped through the cracks of the poorly designed inventory process and been listed for a price so low it could only be a mistake. While shopping, I could visualize my future with each item: the outfits, the occasions, the way they would look on my body.
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My parents’ house — San Francisco, CA — June 9, 2023 — $0
Sometime around the crack of dawn, I awake to find my mother’s body cold. I shake my dad, snoring softly in the twin bed a few feet away. “Dad, wake up. She’s gone.” We have been waiting for this to happen for nearly a week now. Later that day, people bring brownies and say how sorry they are. I cry a lot, but mostly just when I think about how cold she was, how pale. I am surprised by the overwhelming feeling of relief. Later, after people leave, I begin to pick through her dresser and closet. I feel like a vulture, but I want to keep her things. To wear her clothes on my body. I am the exact same size that my mom was before the dementia and before she started drinking. Nearly all her clothing fits me perfectly. I take: her favorite Hardly Strictly Bluegrass sweatshirt, a black zip-up with a Golden Gate Bridge design; her UCSC t-shirt with the bespectacled banana slug mascot I remember her wearing a lot when I was little; a polka dot blouse-and-skirt set she must have worn to the office, back when she still worked; the rayon satin jacket she used to wear to cousins’ weddings and bar mitzvahs; several Hawaiian-style sundresses that conjure memories of eating shave ice in the warm Kauai sun; and various sweaters, blouses, and pants from Cut Loose, a favorite San Francisco mom brand. There is so much to choose from, a lifetime of clothing suddenly without an owner. I take only what I know I will treasure. Even so, I wonder how I will fit it all in my closet.