Welcome to another unfun grief-addled post here at Anna’s New Rome!

Setting: I just returned from Jeff’s storage unit in Virginia.
Warning: Strong language, marital issues.

Okay folks in the SCA, 501st, cosplay, military, and everything in between: We need to have a Very Serious Chat.

I am putting on no airs here: I own a lot of stuff, but I’ve also made a conscious effort to cull this stuff significantly in the last few years when I realized it was not sustainable anymore. Us who craft, especially in any form of reenactment or living history, have to juggle owning things for multiple people when it’s really just us. I have a whole room just for my SCA life, this includes a sewing table, cutting table, painting table, and all the accoutrements needed to do all of these things. And while that sounds reasonable, it gets out of hand very, very fast if you aren’t paying attention. It’s so easy to go on insane shopping sprees for fabric, trim, pigments, tools, etc when we do this, and that’s okay, but we need to remember to USE these things and to part with those that no longer serve their purpose. The problem, as many of us addressed when faced with our imminent mortality since 2020, is the “sunk cost fallacy,” which is what I struggle with the most. But every time I throw out bags of junk, I feel more free. Right now I’m staring at my entertainment center and wondering if I can take this on this coming weekend and really get rid of a lot of extraneous bric-a-brac. I’m that over it.

When lived in Providence, I still had this whole room, but I had a hard time managing it, often having to call in friends to help me figure shit out because the executive dysfunction of ADHD would win every damn time. This just got worse in Portsmouth, which is when I decided NO MORE, and started to manage my belongings better when it came to a cross-country move to San Diego, despite Jeff glittering the ceiling with pewter and lead when he got a bit too torch-happy indoors. Unfortunately, San Diego is when Jeff really took over.

We didn’t have a garage in Portsmouth or Providence, we did in San Diego. And despite leaving items in storage in New Hampshire, he insisted on getting more out west, starting with the Bug and all of the tools needed to work on her. This seems benign, and it felt that way, because it was contained in the garage and I managed to keep a pretty tidy home there, but Jeff was also not home a lot, it being sea duty, so I didn’t get the full brunt of what hoarding really looked like until Jacksonville, and especially, COVID.

I need to remind folks that the Jacksonville move was not good. He had orders back to Groton that were stripped and replaced with a Kings Bay hot fill. This was enough to make me actually have a nervous breakdown because I had a home and a job lined up in Connecticut, developed mood disorders, and have to begin therapy after a fun stay on the grippy socks floor at Balboa. (People forget that the military life generally sucks, and it’s not the aristocratic nostalgia for wartime glam that some assume it is.) I also assume this is about when Jeff started to become sick, only we had no idea. Between the two of us struggling, cleaning was not always easy, but I managed to always pull it off, no matter how shitty I felt, because being a Florida native I know what can happen if things get nasty. *shudder*

But, Jeff didn’t just get out of control with the Bug, he got out of control with the bar, brewing, moneying, and 3D printing at the same time I was trying to make a living with silk painting and sewing thanks to being unable to find decent work in Jacksonville, and later Norfolk. Remember: milspouses are discriminated in the workplace because we’re seen as temps, so trying to find work, even with my resume from CA, was impossible on the East Coast. So every room in the house had a project. Every. One. The dining room was where I painted silk. The library became the 3D printing lab alongside my jewelry bench, the garage became an epicenter of pure madness and the bar appeared in the middle of this in the dining room and then lanai. It was too much. When Covid hit and we were both home, at first it sounded like a great way to catch up, but it just got worse. I ended up not sewing the nifty fabrics I bought to make cute dresses, he didn’t use the piles of lumber he bought to make furniture. He also wasn’t out there working on the Bug, citing Florida heat in the garage, but still buying parts for it. I brought this up to my therapist and she warned me that it was going to balloon if I didn’t nip it in the bud. Hoarding behavior, even when started as benign, is a form of addiction, addiction to consumerism, and the _idea_ of project completion, and if projects are not coming to fruition, then the supplies are now a hoard, and need to be dealt with. This was the time when I should have gone to Oxford for my paper on the Marian Relics, but because of Covid, I opted to go to visit Bestie for a week and help him untangle his father’s estate and the last of his grandmother’s belongings.

So there I was, going through boxes and boxes of someone else’s things, getting a firsthand account of what happens when you die and your possessions become “somebody else’s problem”, and it was also when the Cymbalta they gave me for fibromyalgia caused tardive dyskinesia and amplified my depression. I got back to Jacksonville off an emotional rollercoaster into a house that I left Jeff in unsupervised for a week, and threatened to walk into the Atlantic Ocean. Instead, I got carted back to therapy twice a week and told to stop taking the pills and I would feel better. At this point we already knew we were moving to Norfolk, they just weren’t settled on the timeline yet. I was angry that we had to deal with another move, surrounded by junk, and wanting none of this. So, one day, I called him at work, which I rarely did because calling base is one of those, “This needs to be urgent” calls, yeah well, direct line to his desk, and I just unloaded on him:

“You get the fuck home right now and clean this place up, or I am taking my things and the cat home to Tampa for good.”

He did come straight home. He did straighten up, but what I wasn’t seeing is that his “cleaning” was shoving random things into bins. These are the doom boxes I had to look at in Norfolk this weekend. This didn’t stop. He didn’t stop. He insisted he wasn’t a hoarder, but a packrat (really?) and there were regular fights about how he managed his belongings. So, we started couple’s therapy that summer with my therapist who needed to attempt to hammer it into his head what was going on. This was also about when he started having visible symptoms of cancer and getting ignored by the Navy, so in hindsight my behavior feels awful, or, maybe, I wasn’t hard enough. Jeff had me leave when the movers came for our things because of the “anxiety” I would have watching them touch my things, and to get Harald out of the way so he didn’t flip out either, but that didn’t stop me from seeing the bins and bins that went into the now 2-car garage we had in Norfolk, which just gave him more space to collect more tools.

We never really fully settled in up there. I hated it immediately, I was unable to find work because of the pandemic and obvious Navy base resume, so that’s when I started applying for PhD programs after a lengthy discussion with him on what I needed to do with my life to be happy. The answer was to get out of there, away from him, in my own space while he finished up the last 2 years in the Navy as it would be mostly deployment anyway, and we could both downsize and work on our issues. It wasn’t separation, it was geo-baching, but my unhappiness with his hoarding was becoming a major issue, and he promised me that he would go through all of his junk and such and get rid of what he could. I have no doubt it started like this, there is a rhyme and reason to the rear of the storage unit, but the bins and bins and bins say otherwise. I don’t want to say I was lied to, but neither of us knew what was coming, so I assume that he planned to just address it during his time in port.

This all makes me feel terrible, but also angry. When we rolled that door up on Friday afternoon I could have spat. The first thing on my mind was “gas can”, but that’s irrational, no matter how fun it sounds. I knew I would have help. I knew this needed to be tackled. But I also know I shouldn’t have had to do this. He had warning that his hoarding made me loathe his existence, that it was the catalyst that was well on the way to destroy our marriage, and now it’s entirely on my shoulders. All of his years of accumulated junk tools from Harbor Freight, a completely disassembled 1976 VW Sun Bug, and whatever else he had on top of four 3D printers, a shelf of filament, all of our collective brewing materials and camping equipment. Hell, there’s a full oak barrel in there used to age stout.

This is not just a vent, this is a cautionary tale: It is not sustainable or healthy to live like this. While you may not think that your precious “collections” harm anybody, they are. We couldn’t have friends over in Jacksonville because I never knew what the house would look like.

I’ve also made it perfectly clear, many times, that books are a Problem. I have almost all the books, I found ONE box up there (thank god). Everything else is here, and I cut my stacks by half last year. You need to keep a working collection, not piles. I cannot stress this enough as a former librarian and archivist: Books can actually kill you, and the answer is not “more shelves.” They attract major pests and mold, in addition to being heavy and unstable if not shelved correctly. If you haven’t read a book in over 10 years: get rid of it. If it’s a scholarly publication that has had updated research in the last 20 years: Get rid of it. This is not a joke. I am serious, and I make these posts regularly to remind people to weed your collection. Libraries do this for a reason, and if you want a working library in your home, you need to act like it.

Fabric can also kill you. It attracts pests and mold, much like books. Even when stored appropriately the natural decay of cellulose and protein creates dust, and that causes microscopic issues around your home including making you ill. If you’ve been saving a special linen for a decade or so, there’s a good chance it may not survive the sewing process if you don’t live in a home with central AC, or worse, you store it in storage or a garage. Get rid of it.

PLA is biodegradable. My guess is that most of those tubs of 3D printing material in there are full of goo, not filament, but I won’t know until I can open every single one of them.

Jeff left a mess of tools. Some are very expensive and carry value, but that’s just some, and I have most of them here already. Those bins and bins and bins of Harbor Freight doodads? Junk. Pot metal. I may not even be able to recycle them, so I have to figure out how to safely dispose of all of this when I’m not a resident of Norfolk and have no access to their dump facilities. There’s also bins of flammable and caustic chemicals still in there because we have no idea what to do with them until I can do more research and determine the cost of disposal. The two shelves in the middle were full of spray paint that was exploding. We removed them and were able to dispose of the paint.

The reason for this post is that I know I’m not alone. I know that there are many of my friends and associates out there that have piles and piles in their garages, a timebomb of “that’s somebody else’s problem after we die.” Don’t do this, please. Consider the future and the impact you’re leaving on others and the planet. Consider the burden your loved ones will inherit when you do, eventually, shove off this mortal coil. While it’s not easy, or cheap, to juggle the living history life, we need to do better for ourselves, our mental health, and our loved ones. Don’t leave them with a sketchy storage unit 5 states away and the monetary burden it will be to disperse and dispose of it.

If, after reading this, you’re still on team, “They who die with the most books/fabric/tools/insert junk here, wins!” I beg you to reconsider.

No, Jeff didn’t know he was going to die, but there’s a chance neither will you. Please don’t leave your partner in the same predicament I am in. I miss him terribly and this weekend was a horrifically emotional journey, but if necromancy was real, I’d kill him again for this.