Dear Mr. King,

Thank you for doing a show on hoarding, it's an incredibly difficult issue to deal with for both the hoarder and the their family members.  Three years later, I'm still trying to clean up my father's mess.

A few years ago my father suffered a massive stroke and has since been living in a nursing home, he is only 65.  It was when I went down to care for him in the hospital that I realized why he never invited me into his home.

The home that was once his mother's, a beautiful craftsman bungalow in the Salinas Valley, had become something of a landfill.  Furniture stacked upon furniture, 20 sacks of sugar, bags of empty plastic bags, some of it made sense and some of it didn't.  Three bedrooms, two living rooms, a kitchen and a breakfast nook were all stacked to the rafters with junk.  Not to mention the enclosed porch, garage and two storage closets also attached to the house.  The office he kept downtown was nearly as bad.  I hauled exactly 1 ton of old records to the shredder that he was no longer required to keep.

The amount of food alone that he hoarded could have fed a family for months.  I don't know why he didn't ask for help and I don't know why he did this, but it became my responsibility as his only real living relative.

Perhaps what is most telling is the fact that I had to hire and exterminator to search for the cat that had died in the mess of the breakfast nook.  The cat that had been mine until I went to college, I had never had the heart to take her back from him.

Today, I'm still dealing with all of his stuff along with numerous legal issues.  I've learned a lot from this, but it is probably best summed up in a simple statement I made to a friend while we we're knee deep in the junk: "Stuff makes you sick."

Thanks again,

Melissa H.