Gray Area: The things they didn't carry

The remnants of the old woman's life have been sorted and now they're being priced: an Easter basket, a stuffed frog, a box of Depends; ping-pong paddles, a map of New Mexico, a box of Valentine candy. The stuff is piled up everywhere in the little house. Outside, her once immaculate front yard is covered in bindweed.

The woman herself has moved to the Midwest, to be closer to a daughter, taking along enough furniture and favorite paintings to furnish a small condo. She didn't stick around to see the price tags on the dolls and the dishes. Those old postcards and board games, the aprons and souvenirs? She left them all.

We spend most of our lives accumulating: amassing the things that are a visible record of our earning power and appetites. But at some point we begin to get smaller. Geriatricians speak of a "life-space diary" that reveals the shrinking geographical distance a person tends to travel as he ages, a diminishment that moves from world to country to region to neighborhood to house to bedroom to bed. And with each move — to a condo, then maybe an apartment in assisted living or a son's house — there are belongings left behind.

Whether it's a wall full of oil paintings in the home of a wealthy east-side physician, or the inexpensive but extensive Pez collection of the woman who raised six children in a downtown bungalow, at some point it all gets redistributed to family or strangers. Or thrown in the trash.

One morning Patrick Hafner and John Goates move through the old woman's house. The men, former antique store owners who now labor as A-1 Estate Services Inc., are overseeing the rearrangement of dresses and trinkets and household cleansers. "Usables" as opposed to collectibles, Goates explains. That's what most people have at the end of their lives. That and maybe a stack of receipts and margarine containers no one wants.

But even then, it's often hard for families to let go. Hafner remembers two sisters who sat at their mom's dining room table for two months after her death, strolling memory lane with each knickknack and necklace, before they gave up and asked for help.

As for the seniors themselves, some have a harder time than others parting with their stuff. At one end of the spectrum, there's the man in Park City who told his wife, "Just sell it all; I want to go golfing." At the other end there's the man who moved into his mother's house, already stacked high with papers, books and other belongings. When she died, he simply squeezed her stacks closer together and started his own, floor to ceiling, leaving only little trails from room to room. It took three large trash bins, Goates says, to clear the hoarder's house — an archaeological dig into one man's life.