Ms. Henry's Mess

The first thing the morgue boys had to do when they found out Ms. Henry died was clear a path through the house for a stretcher to take away her body. They had to clear a path on account of all of her mess, all of her stuff.

Mary-from-around-the-corner told me that she once stopped by to drop off some misdelivered mail and Ms. Henry opened her front door and all Mary could look at was the piles and piles of newspapers and magazines. She said they were stacked to the ceiling. She said that behind Ms. Henry was just more junk, more junk scattered as far into the house as she could see. And that was two years ago. I imagine there’s a lot more that’s built up since then.

I’ve never been inside that house. I’ve never seen through the front door. I don’t want to see Ms. Henry’s garbage dump of a house.

 

I haven’t seen my mom in three years. I couldn’t stand to see her like that�"living in filth. She had to clutch onto piles of worthless belongings to avoid tripping while walking to the kitchen.

She kept everything. She always had, but it got worse when I was in high school, when she really started to realize that I was growing up. I knew she still had clothes and toys from when I was a kid�"they were cute, I can understand that�"but she wanted to keep my pants and my shirts after I outgrew them. I was a teenager, a growing boy with raging hormones.  I was a young man, and my mom was saving my old boxers.

 

 When we got the call, they said this could be a humdinger. We’d seen all kinds of stuff: stabbings, gunshots, the seemingly more pleasant sleep deaths, overdoses. This couldn’t be any worse. We were told she was in the master-bathroom, towards the back of the house. The lady was older, probably in her sixties, and she must’ve been going crazy. Bill and I wheeled the stretcher up the driveway.

“Why do you think they warned us about this one?” he said, fiddling with the zipper on the body bag. “This can’t be any worse than that homecoming queen we had to pull off the shore.”

I opened the front door and realized the problem. Along the walls of that entry hallway were stacks upon stacks of ancient newspapers and magazines. Past the hallway, things looked much more hectic. Past the hallway, there was no path. There were valleys of garbage amongst the mountains of debris. Bill and me and the stretcher had absolutely no chance of smoothly making it to the bathroom where Ms. Henry was, and no chance of finding the bathroom in this wreckage.

 

Those poor morgue boys. They’re just supposed to pick up bodies. But these two that I saw, they had to clean a house first. They didn’t come out of that house for at least two hours after going in.

They weren’t bringing any of the trash out, so they must’ve moved it out of the way, moved it around, rearranged it. Becky-in-the-blue-ranch-house walked up to one of those morgue boys to ask how it was going in there. She told me the morgue boy said it was like the most disappointing treasure hunt she could imagine. The other one said it was like a flea market for trash pickers.

 

My mom claimed that she just “collected things.” What she was doing wasn’t collecting. Keeping empty mustard jars and cardboard toilet paper roll isn’t collecting. I didn’t know it wasn’t normal to live like this. When I was a kid, I thought we had a lot of shampoo and a lot of neat dishes and Tupperware. In retrospect, most of the shampoo bottles were from motels, and no one needs two kitchen cabinets full of plates and a third full of Tupperware.

She hated her mess, I know she did. She was ashamed of it. I didn’t have friends over because she didn’t want them to see the laundry all over the couch and the stacks of paperwork and bills on the kitchen table. She didn’t want them to accidentally grab the expired yogurt she kept meaning to throw out.

 

We had to leave the stretcher on the front porch at first; it just wouldn’t fit. Bill and I decided that we should first brave the mess-laden paths before clearing the way. We did still have to find the bathroom.

We stepped on pizza boxes and TV dinner trays on the way through the front room. Under heaping piles of worn, outdated clothes, we saw traces of living room furniture. There was a coffee table almost completely covered in boxes. The space between the coffee table and the couch, where a normal person would’ve had space to walk and sit, was packed with plastic grocery bags full of plastic grocery bags and empty water bottles collecting dust.

In front of us was the kitchen. We didn’t step foot on the linoleum floor of that kitchen. Bill and I could tell from where we were standing we didn’t need to be any closer. The stove was caked with brown and black drips, burnt food forgotten and crusted. The sink was overflowing with dishes and pots and pans. It looked like this old woman hadn’t cooked food or used dishes in years.

 

I don’t know where she got all of that stuff or how she managed to keep it all in her house. I used to see her waddle up her front steps carrying boxes or a footstool or a casserole dish.

A few weeks ago, I saw Ms. Henry at the supermarket as I was checking out. Her cart was full of Stouffer’s and Lean Cuisine TV dinners.

“She comes in here every week. Wednesday. Fills her cart up with frozen dinners. It’s weird,” the cashier whispered, noticing my stare.

 

She wouldn’t clean it. She couldn’t clean it. There were too many things, just too much, to even begin cleaning. When I was still visiting her, I would gather a few things she hadn’t used or thought about in ages, and I would throw them out. The first time I tried this, she found a rolling pin and a Dr. Seuss book in the trashcan outside. She said her cousin Rachael gave her the rolling pin as a housewarming gift, and the Dr. Seuss book was the first book she ever read to me.

“You can’t seriously expect me to let you throw these out.”

            My mom actually said that. She hadn’t rolled dough or read Dr. Seuss in over fifteen years. When she said that, I decided the next time I did this, the trash would go off property and out of sight.

 

            Bill and I tried to clear a two foot wide path for the stretcher as we walked through the house. The hall leading to the bedrooms was crowded with shelves and side tables. Ceramic baby figurines and stuffed animals clung to their spots on the shelves. There were pictures of a little blond boy�"one in a cowboy hat, one where he had lost his front teeth, one where he was playing with toy cars. All the frames were covered in a thick layer of grey-brown dust.

            Bill opened a door on the right side of the hall, a spare bedroom. It looked more like a storage facility. There were milk crates full of records and laundry baskets full of books. A television sat in the middle of the room, unplugged. There were four dead potted plants sitting on stacks of manila folders on a desk in the corner. A mattress had been leaned against the wall. I closed the door, and we continued down the hall.

 

            Years ago, Ms. Henry’s son worked at the hardware store in town. No sixteen year old boy wants to work in a hardware store. Then again, no sixteen year old boy wants to sit at his house in a grimy mess made by his mother. I think the only reason that boy kept his job was so he wouldn’t have to be in her house as much. He always looked so sad, so lonely. He would was able to find the right drill bit or pipe joint, but he never smiled when he told me to have a good day.

 

            I haven’t been happy in my mom’s house since I was a kid. As I got older, I spent less time there. I went to the library a lot. I worked at a hardware store in town.

            The mess in that house cluttered my thoughts; I couldn’t function. I couldn’t eat there because the smell made me nauseous. I couldn’t sleep there because I could hear bugs crawling and flies buzzing.

A steady stream of trash and junk led Bill and I through the open door at the end of the hallway into the master-bedroom. There were three dressers along one wall with drawers open, spewing clothes onto the floor. The mattress had no sheets on it and was stained with brown and grey splotches. We squeezed past the junk skyscrapers towards the bathroom door.

Bill nudged the door with his boot, and it creaked slowly open. For the first time, we saw the lady who had lived and died in this chaos. This miserable, wrinkly old woman died face down on her bathroom floor. Next to her toilet, brown with rust and grime. Next to her bathtub, stained with a greenish-brown ring.

“I wonder who’s going to clean this since she’s dead,” Bill said as we worked our way outside to get the stretcher.

 

It’s been two days since Ms. Henry died, and I haven’t seen any sign of her son. Patty-from-two-houses-down told me that she heard Tim Henry is flying in tomorrow from halfway across the country to deal with his mother’s will and funeral and house. The funeral will probably be the easiest compared to the other two obligations.

 

I got the call from the coroner’s office two days ago. They asked me if I was Mr. Timothy Henry, next of kin to Ms. Ada Henry. I told them I was, and they told me she was dead. For all I know, she could’ve been crushed by a landslide of boxes or books. She could’ve tripped over her mess and broken her hip; unable to get up, she could’ve starved.

I could’ve gotten a plane ticket that day, but I didn’t. I had to process the idea of not only my mother being dead, but her dying in that rat nest. A sad excuse for a home.

I’ve been out of that home for years, and I still don’t think I’m ready to go back.

 

We rolled the stretcher into the bedroom. Bill unzipped the body bag, and we slid it under the woman’s body. I pulled the edges of the bag up around her legs and her arms and her head. Looking at her in the bag, it seemed like she was probably a nice old lady�"curly hair, a silly sweater, big glasses. I never would’ve thought a little old woman could make a mess like this, and die in it.

             I zipped up the body bag, and we lifted her onto the stretcher to take her to the morgue.