Review by Linda McCauley Freeman
There is an almost indescribable moment when you first nudge your way into a hoarder’s house. An assault not only of your senses, but also of the very foundation of reality, stability and yes, sanity. About five years ago, I felt that sensation when I tried to open the door to my 90-year-old aunt’s apartment in Queens. I had no inkling of what was to come, no clue to prepare me when the door wouldn’t open more than a foot and I had to slide in sideways.
In Deborah Derrickson Kossmann’s memoir, Lost Found Kept, she has more than an inkling of what lies behind the door of her mother’s house, already littered with clues from its external condition and her mother’s request that no one visit. It is one of the reasons she and her sister had been telling themselves and each other that they were “respecting her privacy” for almost 30 years by never stepping foot inside their childhood home despite living an easy drive away. It is one of the reasons Derrickson Kossmann had been protecting herself by not insisting.
She is not alone. Many adult children of aging parents will recognize the hope that a parent can continue to live independently and a parent’s denial that help is needed. It is far easier to believe the fantasy until something, in this case a car accident, forces a reaction, and one has to open that door.
But even the worst suspicion cannot prepare Derrickson Kossmann for what she sees when she enters the house. “…[the door]opens a tiny bit, less than a foot. It’s so dark inside, it takes a minute for our eyes to adjust. The smell is terrible, a wave of funk hitting us like a storm cloud….everything is covered with stuff. There is no floor, there’s kind of a sloping step made of things: bags, unidentifiable solidified objects that are about a foot tall.”
She takes us with her on this assault of sight and smell, and it is only as her eyes adjust to the light and what is before her that she can begin the process of discernment:
“…there are no visible stairs now, even though I remember six of them, covered with 1970s burnt-orange carpeting. There are just objects piled up, like a mountain. We climb over books, papers, clothing, and empty plastic shopping bags, our feet sliding and barely able to push forward, up into the kitchen…I can touch the ceiling as we stand next to the refrigerator.”
Yes, the piles are so high, Derrickson Kossmann, who has entered this house with her husband, Marc, can touch the ceiling merely by reaching up.
And as she re-enters her mother’s house, and its literal mountains of garbage, in this memoir Deborah Derrickson Kossmann, also enters her childhood home, piled equally high with its own emotional garbage.
The book, winner of the 2023 Agora Polaris Award, and published by Trio House Press, is divided into three parts, as the title suggests: Lost, Found, and Kept. Like many of us, she lives simultaneously in the present and the past as she works through the integral questions she constantly asks aloud while climbing through the debris of her mother’s house and her childhood:
“How can she live like this? Who lives like this? I don’t understand.”
“Does she think she deserves this? Does she not see how it really is?”
“What kind of person does this?”
Difficult and maybe unanswerable questions, but Derrickson Kossmann, who is a clinical psychologist, also turns the lens and these questions on herself. It is too simplistic to say she both loves and hates her mother. It is too simplistic to say she likely became a psychologist to better understand her own issues. So, she takes us with her as she unpacks the shambles of the literal house and her childhood, including her search for and meeting of the two fathers she lost: her biological father she never knew and the stepfather who adopted her and then abandoned her as a teenager. And as she clears the house, she finally finds equal footing with her mother.
Most important of all, what shines clearest throughout the book is the triumphant teamwork between herself and her husband, who not only stands by her side throughout the hours and hours inside the house, but, unlike all the other men in her life, has always been there for her, even through these worst of times.
Lost Found Kept by Deborah Derrickson Kossmann
Trio House Press, January 2025
ISBN 978-1949487336
Linda McCauley Freeman is the author of two poetry collections: The Family Plot (Backroom Window Press, 2022) and The Marriage Manual (BWP, 2024). www.LindaMcCauleyFreeman.com