Letting Go

It all came to a head when my mother-in-law died.

Mind you, I knew about my husband’s quirks from early on. The first time I visited his mother’s house I snuck a peek into his childhood bedroom on the way back from using the bathroom. I’d never seen anything like it outside of reality television. Stacks of magazines and newspapers covered the walls from floor to ceiling, and every spare bit of floor space except for a narrow path to the single bed was filled with piles of old toys, stuffed animals, and miscellaneous bric-a-brac.

But I was young and in love and I was certain I could change him, a project I began as soon as we moved into our new house.

“Here we are,” I proclaimed as we stood together in the third bedroom. It was definitely bigger than a box room, certainly large enough to suit my husband’s needs. “You can have this room for your own, we’ll put your desk in here as well as that hideous bachelor sofa and your bean bags. I’ll install some shelves on the walls and in the closet, so you can store your thousands of CDs. What do you think?”

Mark took a quick look around the room, nodding his head. “Seems OK. Although I am mortally offended by the slur on my sofa. It’s perfectly presentable, and who cares what a sofa looks like anyway? You’re sitting on it, not looking at it.”

“So we have a deal, then?” I reiterated, not wanting to get drawn into the sofa argument. “You can keep all your junk in here, just so long as the floor is clear so I can vacuum, right?”

“Whatever,” came the laconic response.

But as the years progressed, so did the accumulation of books, CDs, magazines, and unused gifts, until soon there was only a pathway to the desk, which was piled high with mail, old work stationery, and grocery receipts. The precious sofa with its objectional upholstery was buried under unwashed sweaters and old blankets. What you could still see of the window was grimy with dust as I hadn’t found an easy way to reach it to clean.

It got to the point where I couldn’t look at the room without experiencing feelings of anxiety. Mark must have grown tired of my martyred sighs because he began closing the door between visits.

My marriage was important to me, and I loved my husband, so I tried to see things from his point of view, to understand why he felt he needed to keep almost everything ever purchased or given to him. I spent one whole week cataloguing the fifteen boxes of music magazines he had stored in the garage, then comparing the result to prices online, desperately seeking some sort of justification for his ‘collection’. But it was no use, the magazines were worth less than ten pounds altogether. Minus shipping costs. And anyway, despite his talk of how valuable these things would be someday, there was never any suggestion of selling.

You may be thinking I should have sought professional help, but there was never any question of Mark getting psychiatric advice, or even marriage counselling. He’d made that clear early on. “I’ve never been to me, and I’m never going,” he declared, riffing on Charlene’s 70s pop song. I’d thought it was cute at the time, and oh so clever, because in addition to being funny and handsome Mark was very, very clever. Plus, I was sure he didn’t really mean it. But he did, and soon I found myself looking up symptoms and treatments for obsessive-compulsive disorders, searching for subtle ways to treat what might be an undiagnosed medical condition.

Based on my reading, I tried repeatedly to make deals with my husband, using any complaint as a bargaining chip.

“Do you have to play that iPad game every night?” he grumbled at me one evening.

“Tell you what,” I said, “I’ll stop playing if you’ll clean up your shit room.” (My names for the room had grown progressively coarser as time passed and resentment grew, which in hindsight probably didn’t help my cause.)

“Fine,” Mark snapped. “But I’m betting you won’t be able to go cold turkey on that thing.”

He was wrong, as it happened, I gave up playing the game immediately. But after three months I surreptitiously—then openly—began playing again, more frustrated than ever that there had been no change to crap central.

“Why not rent a storage space?” I suggested with what I thought was admirable reasonableness.

“I want my things near me, I check them all the time, I don’t want to have to drive to a storage locker to see my own stuff!” he responded, his voice gradually getting louder as panic set in at the thought of being separated from his beloved items.

As his mother got to know me better, she tried to get me to help convince her son to clear his stuff from her house, which I thought was rich since Mark’s hoarding problem was obviously one that should have been addressed in childhood. I could understand his parents, who had him late in life, being hesitant to consider a possible mental illness, but surely they must have noticed something amiss? And where was he supposed to put everything, in our already overcrowded home? No, I told her she would have to address the problem with Mark personally, and was unsurprised when everything stayed where it was. She depended on his goodwill too much since the death of his father. I began to dread the arguments to come after she died.

We’d been married fifteen years when that finally happened. As I hugged my crying husband and provided comfort and sympathy through the funeral and the death duties, my thoughts were constantly circling around the upcoming discussion of what to do with my mother-in-law’s house.

We found ourselves there on a beautiful spring day, the kind that makes you forget the grey drizzle that comprises the majority of British weather. The burglar alarm had gone off multiple times during the previous night and the neighbours had called to complain, so we ‘d promised to deactivate it.

As my husband dealt with the alarm I made my way down the hallway, looking into rooms as I passed. It was worse than I’d imagined. In addition to his own bedroom, the guest room was now crammed with baskets and boxes of clothing and paraphernalia, and I knew from my mother-in-law’s complaints that the attic would be similarly full. He must have been bringing stuff here over the years to avoid criticism, I surmised. It was definitely time to face the issue head on.

Mark found me gazing into his bedroom, trying to plan an approach that wouldn’t immediately make him defensive.

“What are you doing in here?” he asked suspiciously.

I turned to look at him, keeping my face as neutral as I could. He was still the man I loved. “Mark, have you thought about what we’re going to do with the house?” I asked gently.

His face closed up instantly, his lips compressed into a thin line, his eyes narrowed. “My mother has JUST died! Can’t you leave me alone for one second while I deal with that?”

I took a mental breath to stay calm. “It’s been three months, Mark. The house is sitting here empty, dark, and now without an alarm system. It’s an invitation to burglars, squatters, or kids looking for a place to have a good time. It’s getting dirtier, more shabby, more impossible to sell or even maintain the longer we wait. But I haven’t said anything before, and even now all I’d like to know is if you’ve thought about what you want to do with it?”

“No! I haven’t! And I won’t be rushed into anything! This is my house, and I won’t be told how to handle it by anyone. If you don’t like that, then you can leave, I’m tired of your constant nagging!”

Amidst all the wheeling and dealing over the years we’d always carefully avoided ultimatums, but here we were at last. Anger and despair welled up in me as I met my husband’s eyes, and I could tell he suddenly realised he’d gone too far. He’d given me a way out, and I was finally ready to take it.

That was when he pushed me into his jam-packed bedroom, causing me to trip and fall backwards onto a pile of papers. He grabbed the key from the lock on the inside of the door and pulled it closed. There was a click as he locked me in.

I sat there in stunned silence for a full ten seconds before jumping to the door. “Mark!” I yelled, pounding on the heavy wood. “Don’t be ridiculous! Let me out!” His footsteps receded down the hall, followed by the slam of the front door.

I looked around me while waiting for him to return, as common sense told me he must. From the yellowed state of the newspapers and magazines I could see at the bottom of the piles, I suspected there might be an issue or two that would prove valuable, particularly if they documented a famous event. Certainly, the ancient Dinky cars piled in a ratty cardboard box would fetch a bit of cash. But mostly, like in our own home, the room overwhelmingly contained stuff that any right-thinking person would have loaded into a skip years ago. I settled back on the pile of papers to wait.

***

It has now been four days and there has been no sign of Mark. I’ve spent the time seeking some way out of this prison. I managed to clear a path to the window, but it was triple glazed and locked tight. A search for something in the room to try and crack through the glass has proven fruitless, even the bed is only a mattress on top of a box-spring pedestal, with no handy bed frame to break up and use as a battering ram. It looks like Mark has gotten rid of any other furniture, probably to free up more space for his things.

The neighbours, close enough to hear a burglar alarm, have proven to be too far away to respond to my cries for help or to hear my increasingly bruised and bloodied fists banging on the window. I have no family to report me missing, no job, and Mark will have undoubtedly come up with a story to assuage any concerns raised by my few friends until it is much too late. I told you he is clever.

I have achieved a bit of vengeful satisfaction by defecating on some of his precious magazines, which I piled into a corner of the closet furthest from the bed to minimise the smell. It helped that I found a half-empty bottle of water that first day, which kept me going for a bit. But now even that pleasure is now denied to me as I have run out of the urine, and strength, necessary to fire up my revenge.

So here I sit, my thoughts confused and losing the will to live. My lips are dried and cracked, my throat burns. At least there is plenty of paper on which to record my tragic tale, although who knows if anyone will ever read this. What will Mark do when he finally returns to find my corpse added to his collection? Will he quietly bury me, or leave my bones amid these relics of his insatiable need to hold on to his past?

But wait…fire up my revenge. I wonder…

Somewhere in here I’ve seen a toy magnifying glass, like the ones you get in a Christmas cracker…. Yes! Here it is! The sun--that precious, bright sun--still shines during this unusual week of warm weather. All I have to do is reflect it onto this pile of newspaper next to the window…. OK, that’s definitely getting warmer.

Mark will not have the last word. I will burn this elaborate storage locker to the ground, even if I have to die with it. Maybe then my husband will finally learn how to let go. But you know what? I’m not counting on it.

As the first licks of flame burst into full-on fire, I’m using my last bid of energy to hide these notes in the middle of the still pee-sodden pile of magazines in the closet.  I’ll put a plastic crate over the top before I lie down on the bed for my final rest. There’s just a chance my story may survive as a warning to others. So if you find this and Mark is still out there, ladies, beware!