“There is rodent feces and rodent urine.” – Tony
We’re introduced to Jerri Began, a retired model, who lives in a beachfront condo in Florida. She takes pride on having a spotless home, but we soon find out that she “abandoned” a house over a year ago that she had lived in for 30 years, one in which her daughter Traci grew up in.
And this is when this edition of Hoarders: Buried Alive gets 80 levels beyond bonkers insane.
We see Traci Began – who is wearing a “protective breathing mask” (we also learn that she’s five months pregnant – literally having to climb over the mounds of crap and junk and miscellaneous random objects to make her way through a room in the home. It looks literally hazardous in there, or as though a massive garbage truck dumped a heaping load within the interior of the place.
“Oh, there’s a table,” Traci says, assisted by her fiancé, Tony, as she realizes what’s underneath a portion of the pile of stuff she’s slowly traversing over, mountaineering-style.
In one camera shot, the pile is so high that it looks like it’s less than a foot from brushing up against an overhead lighting fixture. And at another point, Tony shouts, “I swear I could see the floor here!”
And just when you think it could not possibly get worse, we get this from Tony: “There is rodent feces and rodent urine as well as cat and whatever else.”
We then cut to an interview with Jerri, who says in a reasonable voice, “I had a path to my front door. I could go to my bedroom, I could go to the bathroom. I could live there.”
This is what we would call a problem. Like a mental illness problem, for real.
Jerri however admits that in now living in her separate condo, it was a “realization” and her current condo is where she “needed to be.”
Traci recalls that growing up in that house, everything was great as a child, as we see old pictures that showcase at one time it was a well-kept, spacious, and nice-looking place.
The upstairs of the house is no better, and when the couple walks up the stairs it looks like a scene out of The Walking Dead. There’s water damage all over the place, and overall, it looks like the house simply needs to be torn down.
Meanwhile, Jerri claims that she’ll get the place cleaned up at some point, but also angrily tells the camera, “You can’t tell me what to do.” And on the topic of “throwing everything away,” she says, “It’s never gonna happen.”
Therein lies the problem, me thinks.
Jerri refers to herself as a “recovering hoarder.” Upon returning to the house, she claims that “vandals” must have exacerbated the “seven-foot mound” inside for… reasons, I guess. And then there’s lots of “this wasn’t like this” going on.
“So much is wasted in America,” Jerri goes on, “and to me it’s a sin.”
Also: we learn that Jerri found most of this “stuff” “on the side of the road or in Dumpster.”
“I wish I had a landfill to excavate,” she adds.
Jerri and Traci are estranged these days, as the years of hoarding and encroaching mental illness, I’d wager, took their toll.
What’s fascinating about Jerri is that she seems bright enough and is absolutely aware that she’s a hoarder – she uses that term freely – but has no self-awareness of the real damage she has caused to her own property and, more importantly, to her family.
An attempt at having Jerri, Traci, and Toni sit down together to talk to Dr. Rebecca Beaton, a clinical psychologist (with the bizarre background of the trash-filled garage behind them), goes awry quickly when it’s uncovered that Jerri also has something like five storage units, the location of which she refuses to “disclose” to someone.
At this, Jerri gets super agitated, feeling like she’s being ganged up on or some such, and shuts the group therapy session down.
It’s really sad when Dr. Beaton explains that hoarding is a “lifelong illness” and that the chances of “going back to the way she was 25 years ago is very slim.”
Eventually, Jerri is convinced to call in a “disposable service,” though she still insists on doing things “her way.” “Professional organizer” Marci Katz is also brought in to help come up with a plan to sort through what’s essentially a hazardous disaster zone.
The reality of Jerri’s illness comes out most when she insists to others that “other people must have” put the house in its current condition.
Marci unveils a set of “ground rules” to the team that includes:
- Be safe
- Be respectful
- Be calm
- Limit talking
- Take breaks
- Call timeout
Jerri surprisingly encourages everyone that it’s okay to laugh at the bizarreness of what they’re about to do. Tony for his part doesn’t think anything about this is funny and says to the camera that his goal is to be a “robot.” It’s hard to blame him for this opinion.
On top of everything else, there’s pure dirt and muck and insects everywhere. “Jokester” Jerri admonishes her daughter for being a “wuss” for freaking out about “the critters.”
Oh, and then there’s rats too, which had eaten through food containers and all kinds of other stuff.
Jerri’s high spirits vanish when she objected to metal objects being thrown away because of her feelings about the importance of recycling. As she goes off to have a “good scream,” Marci calmly explains to the team that she “hardly sees any metal in here.”
It’s flat out disturbing when Jerri even lashes out at De. Beaton for how the clean up is being handled. Eventually, Traci and Tony need to bail out, which is 1,000% understandable.
At other times, Jerri would be genuinely helpful in the process (of working on her own home, of course), making for a fascinating if unsettling dynamic. And she even does a weird little dance when the trash truck finally rolled away with years’ worth of her junk – five tons’ worth, the Narrator Guy tells us!
Traci and Tony’s help all along has been to take over Jerri’s mortgage on the hoarder house in time for the birth of their child. The cameras return during Traci’s third trimester and part of the house is cleared out to a large extent – even if it doesn’t look incredible.
However, the backyard and other parts of the house is still a wreck, filled with junk, and Tony brings up the very reasonable point that the house still needs to be tented and fully fumigated in order to bring it into a state that is livable.
It’s deeply sad when Traci says of her mom that this disease has turned her into a different person.
I found myself wishing that we could find out what was going on with the house and with this family a little bit down the line, but the episode ends there.