A coworker told me a very similar story. His grandmother is on her way out and he's in charge of her finances now. She has been living with her son (my coworker's uncle) and she's pretty much invalid along with him. Their house got cluttered up just like in one of those hoarder shows. He showed me pictures of their kitchen, but you could barely tell it was a kitchen because of all of the junk lying around. There were beer bottles and cereal boxes everywhere. Trash was strewn across the floor and covered with maggots. To get around, they made small pathways through all of the trash and junk. Shit was unseemly, yo.
Sounds a bit like what happened with my grandparents. My grandmother was a major hoarder, and stored a lot of shit in the basement of their house; it's a huge basement complete with a bar area, bathroom, and laundry room. My granddad built it in the 60s, it's really a beautiful house...but
completely unlivable for old people. Lots of stairs, lots of rooms, etc. So as they got older the house fell into disarray. We'd go over all the time and clean up as our cousins and uncles walked around the house in their dirty fucking shoes.
My cousin moved in with them as a "caretaker" but all he did was buy lots of groceries, cook lavish meals, and leave leftovers in the fridge to rot. I'd go over and find myself throwing out shrimp, chicken cutlets, and other stuff he bought at the market only to never cook. The hoarded stuff started piling up in the basement and even upstairs, and things just got bad. There would be huge plastic bags full of empty pop bottles in various corners of the house, the oven was constantly plastered with cooking oil, the backyard was full of trash, etc. I'd go to the house with my mom to clean up but it was too much; the house is in Detroit, an hour away from us, while the rest of the family lives in Detroit and didn't help at all (outside of one awesome aunt).
After my granddad died, my cousin started spending less and less time in the house, leaving my grandma (who was sick at the time) alone. I missed a lot of school driving down to Detroit to stay with her and try to clean up the trash, and my parents helped too. Trash was piled up everywhere, and while I rarely saw my cousin I was always greeted by the messes he made in the kitchen, and soiled food everywhere. Eventually we got her to agree to move to a convalescence home, and hospice a few months later. I haven't been back to the house since she died. She gave it to my cousin in her will, along with a lot of money. He never payed the bills, lived there even after the city cut the lights/water out, and wasted all the money on food and music equipment before moving out. From what I've heard the house became an absolute pig pen, including buckets of piss everywhere after the toilets stopped working.
