I'm no shrink, and given that my grandfather shunned doctors he was hardly diagnosed. But I'd say by any definition, clinical or otherwise, Grandpa Moe was a hoarder. Unless, that is, there's another term for a condition that leads one to build six sheds on his property to house the books, kitsch, toys and other necessities built up over a lifetime of unchecked accumulation.

Apparently it all got far worse when he was forced into early retirement (another story.) Suddenly, he had every day free to comb local thrift stores and yard sales and demolition sites, adding to his stores of ...well, everything. He needed more pressure cookers to put in the abandoned boat, of course, brass animals to fill the dilapitated trailer next to the A-Frame full of clocks and Victorian pornography, boards to cover the ten-foot heap of gravel he'd "scored" when they tore down a nearby church, and that's to say nothing of the three book sheds, "greenhouse," and kitchen equipment lean-to. The yard was pocked with abandoned pieces of machinery, bales of hay, broken-down vehicles and the odd armchair. The house - a onetime modest 1950 ranch, now a sort of low-rent Winchester mansion - was needless to say packed to the gills with clocks, books, swords, the occasional power tool, kitchen gadgetry and bags of licorice. Naturally, he'd built a separate annex for the deep-freeze, and regularly replenished its stores at a nearby grocery store that stocked only defective and out-of-date provisions. Gold and other precious metals were, of course, melted into ingots and buried somewhere under the house.

In some ways, his mania was more wide-reaching than that of the typical, Collyer-brothers-style hoarder (or, say, my dad's grandmother, whose Bronx apartment was crammed with old newspapers or soiled paper napkins.) His love was a bargain, loosely-defined. And, as is usual with hoarders, he could not part with a single treasure, be it a ten-year-old SAT prep book ("might be useful for your cousin!"), a plastic doll that he'd protest was "imported - from Taiwan!" or the XXL cotton housecoat he'd thought I might be able to "make into something."

According to the UPI piece, hoarders are a source of shame and embarrassment to their children, sometimes to the extend that as teens they leave home. In the case of my grandpa, the greatest sufferer was surely his wife. Grandma Yumma's eyes would fill with tears of resignation when the car pulled up, laden with another hundred discarded microwave cookbooks, a love seat, perhaps a kiddie pool. Her days were spent in fruitless fight against the clutter, the chaos, the ever-encroaching walls of junk. What seemed to us kids a wonderland of musty playhouses and mysterious treasures became, as we aged, a symbol of her defeat. When my grandparents died, in quick succession, the catharsis was swift and unsentimental. The Salvation Army made trip after pickup trip; movers shlepped dumpster after dumpster of gravel and detritus; towers came for the trailer, the cars, the boat. Some artist made a traveling exhibition with the thousands of books. Decades of craziness were erased in a matter of weeks, and yet the ghosts of all that junk somehow manage to haunt all of us still. Says a psychiatrist in the UPI article, getting hoarders to clear out their stuff is "a very challenging process." He has no idea.

Clutter may drive children away from home [UPI]

"Well, has mom agreed to this?"

"That's not a suicide pact, Dad. It's a murder-suicide."

Not to get all 'Lives' on everyone, but a piece in today's "Science Times" made me think of me, me, me! Or, at any rate, my family.

It's the account of a woman who's promised her mother in vague terms that she'll "help her out" should she ever fall ill, knowing full well what this means to a woman who's a member of the Hemlock Society. And it brings up those cases which are less black and white, even for those who find the issue a straightforward one: when the politics of "assisted suicide" don't have a whole lot to do with the misanthrope in question. Take my grandpa!

I've mentioned Grandpa Moe before, a known eccentric who hoarded clocks by the thousands, buried gold bars under the house and kept a deep-freeze full of beef sides in preparation for a vague apocalyptic happening known as "The Bad Times." To call him a pessimist is an understatement: he believed every year was his last, that he'd never live to see a grandchild, that ill-health and dementia were stalking him. He was also a eugenicist (he thought "stupid people" should be fixed), and so wildly "pro-choice" (not that I think anyone of that movement would have been particularly eager to claim him) that he regularly scandalized local pro-life protesters with his arguments for mandatory abortions based on IQ. Needless to say, he had no moral qualms about the issue of euthanasia. When I was pretty young, he took me aside, much as the mother in the Times article does, and asked me to shoot him if he ever "lost it."

In the article, the dutiful daughter agrees. In the end, she is spared a terrible choice when her mother has a swift natural death. In my grandfather's case, things were not so simple. After my grandmother died, he lost all will to live — but then, how much had he ever had? At 87, there was nothing physically wrong with him, but he sunk into a deep depression that quickly led to a general physical deterioration. He grew cadaverous and never left the bed. Then he started the suicide attempts: in his weakened state, he was rather easily disarmed when he went for his guns and swords (yes, an arsenal was necessary for The Bad Times) and tried to hang himself, but when he went on hunger strike, there was not much to do.

People have heard that and asked, "why didn't anyone call 911? They could have put him on an IV, maybe given him antidepressants." Maybe. But no one did. Oddly enough, it had little to do with his "right to die" — if you'd asked many people involved about the politics of it, you'd have found their views far more complex than the story might suggest. We saw it as his wish more than his right, perhaps, but also an act of monumental hopelessness that, at the end of the day, was of apiece with the way he had lived his life. It was certainly what he wanted, but it had less to do with dignity than with the affirmation of a philosophy which, as the days drew on, rapidly ceased to seem an amusing eccentricity and more something deeply sad and rooted in fear. To call it political is silly; my grandfather, much as I loved him, was unwell and his views had no business being imposed on anyone.

In this regard, I thought the Times piece was right: to the extent the personal is political, of course there are ramifications, but the stories are personal and unique. As the piece's author puts it, "my mother had been ready to die for years. Not that she was suicidal, but she had always been one of those people who found the cloud in every silver lining. For my mother, life’s positives outweighed its negatives, but just barely." For my own grandfather, anything less than an ending of despair and doom would surely have nullified the cloudy outlook that had guided his every adult action. What he found in his kind of death was, in a sense, a grim sort of self-fulfilling satisfaction. Why weren't five children, six loving grandchildren, years of health an enticement? Well, that was not what he had planned on. And there is comfort in the expected.

Keeping A Promise When A Life Is Near Its End [New York Times]

Says writer Sarah Kershaw, "It is an awkward topic, a wretched concept, really, and, of course, a terrible insult when flung in your direction." Studies have found that "lookism" exists in almost all spheres of life. A 1994 study, “Beauty and the Labor Market,” found that "unattractive people" earn between five and ten percent less than those found to be beautiful. San Francisco and Washington have put anti-looks-discrimination looks on their books. But it's not as straightforward as other discrimination issues: for one thing, people don't like to think of themselves as "ugly," found wanting behind some societal velvet rope, and why would anyone? It's an absolute insult, yet wholly subjective. It says, in essence, whatever else you are, it doesn't matter.

Then too, what even is "ugliness?" The piece points out that while perceptions of beauty are pretty much cross-cultural — they generally hinge on symmetry and certain perceptions of health — there is no "ugliness" standard and it can be hard to separate such discrimination from racial and ethnic prejudices. It's no secret that more attractive people are perceived as superior and that conventional "beauty" is an asset in almost any industry, but the definition of "ugliness" and its attendant lookism is far more fluid. The only constant? It's bad. "Ugliness is associated with evil and fear, with villains and monsters: the Wicked Witch of the West, Freddy Krueger and Harry Potter’s arch-meanie, Lord Voldemort, with his veiny skull, creepy slits in his nose for nostrils and rotten teeth."

Several people in the piece claim we're having a brief "ugliness moment" because cultural phenomena like Ugly Betty and Shrek celebrate "bringing ugly back." But this cute "ugliness" — which basically consists of a cute girl wearing a frumpy outfit — has nothing to do with the true physical differences that have traditionally stood as shorthand for deeper deficiencies. And this superficial acceptance of the other lasts only as long as it takes for the next episode of Extreme Makeover or Style by Jury to begin, allowing the unfortunate subject to get a new face. We might study the idea of "ugliness" in art and society, confront our prejudices, but the truth is we are so insulated from any difference that, ironically, anyone without braces or Accutane strikes us as grotesque. Today, my Grandpa Moe would probably have been put on Extreme Makeover. But when he was a kid, even if people were a lot crueller, there was no pretense of false acceptance — and at the end of the day, he was just another person.

Move Over, My Pretty, Ugly Is Here [New York Times]