As someone who could only watch the lurid reality TV show Hoarders through my fingers, I approached Lost Found Kept with trepidation. The A&E show’s dramatization of mental illness and exploitation of its subjects is disturbing, to say the least. So, three hundred pages describing the layers of accumulated possessions and trash in one woman’s home? Can one read through their fingers?
But Lost Found Kept is no Hoarders on the page. Author and clinical psychologist Deborah Derrickson Kossmann has created a beautiful, piercing and empathetic—if at times tough to read—memoir in which she reckons with her chaotic childhood: a deeply flawed mother and an abusive stepfather who eventually exited their lives in a haze of mental illness and alcohol.
When Kossmann and her sister realize their aging mother is no longer able to care for herself, they finally visit their childhood home to prepare it for sale. The sisters have long suspected the house had fallen into disrepair, but their mother insisted they not come past the curb. When Kossmann opens the door, she understands why. “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 writes. “It feels like two worlds have collided in a planetary disaster, and I’m standing in the middle of the rubble.”
Kossmann and her husband wear long sleeves, pants, hiking boots and respirator masks. They spray themselves with insect repellant and enter what they have darkly begun calling the Hoarder House. Alongside her sister and brother-in-law, they spend weeks unearthing old family treasures strewn about in unthinkable conditions. Yet even as she sweats her way through the project in the late summer humidity, raging at her mother for letting things get so bad, Kossmann shares clear-eyed reflections on her conflicting feelings about the woman who raised her. The most remarkable thing among many remarkable things in Lost Found Kept is Kossmann’s ability to acknowledge the humanity and goodness in a woman who has brought her so much pain, in part by learning how the pattern of mother-daughter trauma started before her birth.
“From mother to daughter, the anger and pain from your mother, it’s like a stone in your heart,” a family therapist tells Kossmann’s mother. And while that stone can never be truly dissolved, through her poignant memoir, Kossmann provides a sketch for anyone seeking to forgive and move forward.
