Havertown psychologist recounts mother’s descent into hoarding

In a recently published memoir, Havertown psychologist Deborah Derrickson Kossmann explores compulsive hoarding and its impact through what happened inside her own childhood home in Cherry Hill. The decline of her mother’s health marked the start of Kossmann’s journey through mounds of dry cleaning bags, garbage, books, and other accumulated items, piled so high she couldn’t tell where the dining room table was. Her mother had kept hidden the sad reality of how she was living, dealing with her mental health issues, and the shame of her hoarding.

Below is an excerpt from the first chapter of her book, “Lost Found Kept: A Memoir,” lightly edited for length:

It’s a hot and sticky day in early July 2016 when I pull up and park in front of the house in Cherry Hill, looking around to make sure my mother’s dinged-up Toyota isn’t parked in the crumbling driveway. Old mail, circulars, and some plastic bags seep out of the closed garage door. A waterlogged pile of newspapers is solidified near the empty trash can beside the house. The front door is covered with ivy, and I can barely see past the untrimmed arborvitae for a glimpse of the envelopes stuffed in the mailbox which hangs by one hook off the brick wall. All the window shades are closed. The living room windows are blocked by overgrown evergreen bushes that twist and turn against the house, hiding what’s inside.

I’m feeling wilted from the humid New Jersey summer and tired after the 50-minute drive from Havertown, where I live. I’m glad my mother is not home, so I can get out of the car. Over the past 20 years or so, I would occasionally drive by the house on a stealth mission to see how it looked. I’d never linger, fearing she’d pop out and yell at me because I came by without her explicit permission. Nobody just “stops by” this house. My mother won’t let anyone come near the outside, much less invite them in. The day she had her first breast cancer surgery 17 years ago, she was waiting at the curb, bag packed, for me to take her to the hospital. Neither my younger sister, who lives nearby in Medford, nor I, have been allowed to have a key for years. I have not been inside my childhood home since 1987.

I don’t want to be here now. Absentmindedly, I start my old habit of picking at the flesh on my thumb. I heard the question someone asks when I tell them about this. How is it possible you haven’t seen the inside of your mother’s house for almost 30 years?

“Well, it’s complicated,” I’d always answer. “You don’t know my mother.” Until today, keeping my mother’s secret has been mostly convenient for my sister and me, even though it’s strange to other people.

Through the years, Melissa and I have talked about what we will find when we’re finally able to enter the house. The carcass of our old cat, Samantha? Hidden treasure like piles of crisp $100 bills pressed under her mattress? Our husbands, who have never been inside, tease us after a few beers that they are just going to take matters into their own hands and “burn it down” when the time comes. My sister and I joke that if my mother dies, we hope it will happen when she’s not at her house, so at least we’d be notified about it. There’s worry beneath our laughter. We’ve respected her autonomy. It’s her right to live as she chooses, including her decision to not allow anyone inside. But over the past year, there have been a series of incidents. First, there was her hospitalization for frostbitten diabetic feet after she shoveled the end of the driveway during a snowstorm. Then, there was the matter of her landline phone being turned off several times. Finally, she’s told my brother-in-law Ron that she’s running out of money. As I look at the filthy windows, I’m asking, were we wrong to let her live the way she wanted? Should we have done something sooner?

» READ MORE: Hoarding is the only mental-health condition that becomes more common as people age.

It was never a bad house: three bedrooms, one and a half baths, an attic, kitchen, living room, dining room, and rec room downstairs next to a laundry room by the back door. A simple white split-level with some brick on the lower half, it had black shutters and a black front door. My mother placed a big brass knocker over a piece of wood 40 years ago to cover up the window and make the door more secure and private so you couldn’t see in.

Back then she did projects. And the house looked like all the other ones in the development, freshly painted, with a well-groomed lawn. The attached garage was big enough for a car and a clothes dryer, with some room left over for our bikes. The front porch was decorated with a frog statue and a frog planter with a geranium in it. Today I can see the planter from my car window, above the broken steps, empty of flowers and shoved back in the corner of the landing.

I walk up the driveway and around the side of the house. An unpruned tree leans over the chain-link fence that somehow has been bent downward so the gate to the backyard doesn’t work. I push back some big branches to squeeze myself through, trying not to tear my dress. A mosquito bites my bare calf, and I slap it, cursing.

I was supposed to be at a party this afternoon with my husband, Marc, but when I called my mother this morning to wish her a happy 82nd birthday, I found her landline was disconnected for the fourth time in six months. My sister is out of town, so I have no way to tell my mother that our plans to celebrate her birthday tomorrow have changed except to drive 20 miles over here and leave her a handwritten message.

I slap another mosquito and step over more and more of those lumpy piles of newspapers that obstruct the path and are moldering into cement against the back wall of the house. Where once there was a yard with my mother’s carefully planted flowers, now there is a jungle. I loved the pink, red, and yellow roses that separated our yard from the neighbor’s. It was my job to water those roses in the summer. I used to help weed around juniper shrubs on the little hill by the driveway, spread out in a pretty way so you wouldn’t have to mow there.

I take a deep breath. Do I really want to go further? I don’t have another way of communicating with her, so I don’t feel like I have much choice. I’ve come this far today, so there’s no point in backing out. I’ll confess, I’m curious. What is it like here?

Neither my younger sister, who lives nearby in Medford, nor I, have been allowed to have a key for years. I have not been inside my childhood home since 1987.

There’s an empty blue recycling bin blocking the back door, and when I move it, I see most of the storm door’s glass is gone. I open it and notice the door to the inside has broken glass, too, as though someone has put a fist through it. My mother has stuffed this door with yellowing newspaper and heavy, shredded plastic sheets. Mosquitos are starting to swarm out of the bin which is full of stagnant water, and I’m sweating and slapping them away from my face.

I’ve prepared a birthday card, which I’ve placed back into its plastic sleeve because it’s supposed to rain, and I’m planning to tape it to the back door. My message inside the card is gentle. “Happy Birthday. Your phone is out again. Please call me about the time we are meeting tomorrow.”

What I really wanted to write is, Why did I have to give up my plans and drive all the way here to reach you, and why can’t you just pay your phone bill like a normal person, so I don’t have to do things like slink around my old house like a criminal? But as a private practice psychologist I know how to use words that don’t escalate situations.

Twenty years ago, at a lunch, my mother turned to me and hissed, “I know you’ve been sneaking around the backyard trying to get in.” I was shocked at the time since nothing could have been further from my mind than going back to this house. It had taken years of my own therapy to be able to leave it behind. Her paranoia was something I learned to tiptoe away from slowly, the way you would avoid a grizzly bear standing up on its hind legs. I’d never been sure when it would chase me down and devour me. I denied I’d been back, and she looked at me with disbelief. She will know I’ve been here now. And she’ll know I’ve been “snooping” around because the last time my sister left her a note, she’d stuck it on the garage out front.

I keep looking over my shoulder. It’s creepy behind the house under the gray sky, even though it’s mid-afternoon on a Saturday.

“Who lives like this?” I say out loud.

» READ MORE: What drives the need to keep stuff?

I look at the wrecked door and start to tear up. Something is taking shape in the July humidity — a resolve, a rage, a sadness, a fear I don’t fully understand. It’s about what might be inside, but also what this house is telling me about my mother. I’ve seen pictures of houses like this. The dirty, covered windows, the tall weeds blooming all over the yard, the unopened mail — all signs of a life unraveling. I don’t know what I should do about the way my mother is living. But it’s clear to me that Melissa and I need to do something. My mother raised us. She was the parent who was there.

Deborah Derrickson Kossmann is a psychologist in private practice in Havertown and the author of Lost Found Kept: A Memoir, published by Trio House Press in early 2025. For more, visit lostfoundkept.com