David:     Karen, describe for me the difference between the polite clapping at the end of an event of some kind and a standing ovation.

Karen:     That’s easy. A polite clapping is exactly that, just a few little claps. Maybe not everyone even clapping. And it’s over pretty quickly. But a standing ovation is everyone gets to their feet. They often call out, “Hurah, Hurah!” And everyone is clapping. Some of them are thumbing, there’s an electricity in the air, right?

David:     Yeah. What would be such an event?

Karen:     Well, I can think of a game where the home team wins. That would be one for sure.

David:     Well, not only where they win, but where you’ve got something big like a no-hitter.

Karen:     Yeah.

David:     Or it’s in the World Series and it’s a no-hitter. Or in the World Series, it’s a no-hitter. It’s a perfect game. Nobody even reached for space for the other team.

Karen:     Yeah, you can’t do any better than that.

David:     Yeah, those people there on their feet for a long, long time and it’s a raucous response. Yeah, I think when you say standing ovation, usually you think about theater. Have we ever been around when there was a standing ovation?

Karen:     Well, yeah. The one I remember is we were in London. We had attended the performance of Les Misérables. The first time it had been mounted in English.

David:     Yeah, it originated obviously in France. It was in French and now they had translated it.

Karen:     Into English and that theater audience just went crazy. It went crazy. I mean, it was applause that did stop.

David:     Tearing and crying.

Karen:      Yeah, beautiful.

David:      It was amazing. We were there. I remember that very much. This visit, I want to think about the church and whether or not it’s any good at standing ovations.

Intro:      Welcome to the Before We Go Podcast featuring Dr. David Mains and his wife noted author Karen Mains. Here’s David and Karen Mains.

David:     On occasion, Karen, I have given away books we have written, but I have learned that for the most part that’s not a very good idea because when you do almost never do people read them and if they do, they don’t get back to you and say anything as far as what the response was. Recently, a consistent donor to our ministry wrote that she had finished a book she had written and that I could order it on Amazon. Well, that was kind of a brave thing for her to say. But from my experiences where you write books and you wonder what people think of them, I thought I’m going to read that to see how she did.

Karen:     So, I ordered it on Amazon. You grabbed it up.

David:     That was this last week.

Karen:     You’ve read it and I haven’t had a chance to read it myself, but I’ve gone through it some.

David:     Yeah, well, when you say read it, it’s about, I think it’s 230 pages, something pretty close to that in my memory. I’m not exactly sure. But it’s a good size book. And I read it and I found that she did a phenomenal job. And Karen, I figured out the dates because she gives hints throughout the book. She’s probably almost exactly what your age is. You are how old?

Karen:     I’m a very young, 79.

David:     Well, that sounds like what she would say as well. Yeah, we don’t know her well, but we’ve known her over the years.

Karen:     Oh, she’s been a consistent friend of the ministry.

David:     What’s the name of the book?

Karen:     The name of the book is “The Hoarder’s Widow.”

David:     People are probably saying, write that by again.

Karen:     Yeah, hoarder as an H-O-A-R-D-E-R. Someone who is compulsive about hoarding things. So let me read it again. The Hoarder’s Widow in the little tagline is, When Love Butts Heads with Hoarding, and it’s written by Carol E. Niles.

David:     Okay, now she lives in New England. I’d like to just get a feel for what she has written. So, this is toward the beginning of the book and she’s helping us understand what hoarding is like and her desperate need to find help. So, she’s gone to, first of all, ministers.

Karen:     Okay, Bob and I started the counseling journey a year and a half after our wedding because Bob was not cleaning out our future home for the renovation, was resisting help and not keeping his word about what he said he would do.

David:     Okay, Karen, they each have a home and they’re living in Carol’s home now that they’re married and he’s cleaning out his home so they can move there, okay?

Karen:     Right. We were still somewhat in love but making little progress toward getting Bob’s house ready to be my dream home. One day I was in the waist-high stuffed living room throwing away 1970s newspapers. He glared at me. His face was ash and gray. He controlled his rage, but he was mad. He loves stuff more than he loves me, I thought. Today I know that for sure.

The word hoarding came to my mind. I had not considered that word before and that night I typed hoarding into the internet. Wow. About 30,000 references came up. I began reading the criteria in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, and that’s the book used by medical professionals to label mental illnesses. He has no question about it. Bob is a hoarder. He fit the criteria and now what? We were still getting along well enough to sleep together and to go out for a gigantic fried seafood platter two or three times a month. He was still letting me have most of the fried clams. I started looking for hope and help with Pastor Charlie, the first of five Christian pastors that counselors I sought for help. This was before hoarding was publicized on television and there’s a show actually that deals with hoarding now.

David:     So, the most people at least have some understanding of it.

Karen:     Now, but maybe not then. Not one of the five counselors understood hoarding as we do now. Pastor Charlie started with prayer in the first Bible verse he laid on poor unsuspecting Bob was Matthew 6:19-21. “Lay not up for yourself treasures on earth where moth and rust doth destroy or where thieves break in and steal. But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is there your heart will also be.” But just giving Bob a Bible verse did nothing trying to be helpful.

David:     The pastor said kind of laughing. She has a funny sense of humor.

Karen:     It’s very dry. Trying to be helpful. “Bob, can you commit to 15 minutes of Bible study and prayer with Carol in two hours a day sorting and organizing?” “Yes, I love Carol.” Bob said and he did. At the next counseling session, the pastor asked, “Well, Bob, how’d it go? Did you do the Bible study for 15 minutes each day with Carol? My wife and I had been praying for you two.” And Bob said with an honest look on his face. “Yes.” And I sat beside him looking at the pastor shaking. “No, we did it once,” I said. “Bob,” he said, “How did the sorting and organizing go?” “Good, got a lot done.” Still sitting beside Bob, I shook my head, “No.” “Maybe this time-use chart will show us how you were using your time, Bob. Fill it in each day and we will discuss it next week.”

It’s so classic. Nothing wrong with his pastor, but it’s a problem that’s much deeper than these tools that would be helpful for other people to do.

David:     I would not have known what to have done if Carol had come to me as a professional minister to help.

Karen:     So, at the next counseling session, after looking over the blank time use chart, that showed Bob had filled in nothing which the pastor had given him. The pastor says, “Bob, I’ll get together three- or four-men Saturday and we’ll get that place cleaned out.” Bob did not holler out loud at that suggestion, but I bet his mind was hollering. You and your Christian buddies, better keep your hands off my stuff and Bob would not go back to counseling. And it just goes on.

David:     Bob is a believer in a very beautiful believer in many ways. That’s enough to read because it gives us a feel. She has this incredible humor, but it’s self-deprecating in many ways and you get her mixed feelings back and forth.

Karen:     She becomes very fixated on this hoarding. Of course, I think many of us would get fixated on the hoarding. The point of her book is when they were in their early parts of the marriage, that was what she became fixated on. Then what happens, David? Do you want to…?

David:     This is helpful and again, reading snatches is not fair, but it gives you a feel. This is a little bit later and something horrendous is going to take place.

The next morning, about 7.45 am, they had a very vocal argument the evening before. I heard Sadie barking from her crate. I was upstairs, Bob and I were not sleeping together at this point in our marriage. I went downstairs thinking she needed to go out and that Bob had gone to the gym. She was locked in, Sadie the dog, and Bob’s bedroom door was shut. I went in to ask him if he had fed Sadie, but I found him unable to even answer or holler again. And what has happened he has had a massive brain bleed. And they come with the ambulance, they take him to the hospital, and it’s about a day and a half after that that he has gone.

I read just the last part of where she is as the death is coming here.

At 5:16 p.m. the death rattle stopped. Bob was dead. I failed many times in my life as a wife with the first husband, as a mother with one child using drugs and going to jail, the other not liking me too much. I was fired from jobs, she had been a teacher, my friends disowned me, and I was a thoughtless, careless daughter with both of my parents as they would confirm. This disaster I created with Bob, because I did not understand hoarding and because I was selfish, was the worst failure of my life. I’ve prayed and begged God over and over for forgiveness. I know God is a kind and loving God who will forgive, but I don’t feel forgiven. I tell this story because you might be in a similar situation, living with someone with mental health issues who is mean and doesn’t keep his or her word. You don’t have to act the way I did.

Now that’s the reason for her writing the book.

At 7:45 in the morning, on January 8th, 2015, I found Bob unable to do anything. His last gasping breath was taken 33 hours later. It has been seven long years since that terrible moment and a long journey for me to find the real Bob. I did not know or appreciate among the 90% of his treasures I had never seen. He not only left behind 60 entire truckloads of metal, seven lathes, a gigantic bridge port, five 1960s paintings done in art school, a new John Deere tractor in 100 pieces, 35 handsaws, 50 worn out truck tires, but friends, people who loved him and whom he loved, a brotherhood of Bible study buddies and a cult of John Deere tractor devotees. Bob was a finder and a keeper and a diverse, intelligent, perfectionistic, artistic, lovable guy.

Did Bob forgive me? I do not know. His last cognitive acknowledgement of me was his grasp on my left wrist as we waited for the ambulance. As I whispered my love and my sorrow into his ear during his last few hours, maybe his brain was not too gone to realize his wife needed forgiveness and was a sinner like all mankind. This is my hope. So, the book in many ways, there’s humor in it, but it’s almost a confessional.

Karen:     Yeah, it is a confessional. You know that hoarding is an obsessive-compulsive disorder, which we understand. While meaning efforts to help someone overcome this, are not going to work this. It needs to be treated by people who really understand obsessive compulsion. The normal do better, write out charts, that sort of stuff is not going to work. But she didn’t know that really. The outcome of that obsession was the thing that she focused on. And the book is a journey into understanding that and understanding who he really was, what his basic nature was, and then grief over not having been able to be big enough or expansive enough or to grow enough to concentrate on what was really good in her husband.

So, it’s a beautiful portrayal. And honey, so honest and, you know, it’s hard for people to write that way. It’s perhaps a catharsis for her to work it all out in a book form. But the truth is a lot of people are that way. We just focus on what annoys us, not in the great giftedness of the personality or the friend or the husband or the maid or the child that we need to be focusing on.

David:     I’m trying to put into a sentence why I wanted to take the whole of the podcast just to talk about what she wrote, because it’s a huge amount of work. I mean, going through that and saying, “Do I write this? Am I being fair? What am I trying to say?” All of that.

When fellow believers do something remarkable, we do well to applaud. People trying to figure out what in the world were they talking about and where is it going? And I was saying, is there anything in scripture that even hints at what we’re trying to say?

I apologize. It’s not a great proof text for what we’re saying, but it does relate to the same overall conversation. Hebrews 10:24, “Let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds. Let us encourage one another.”

So, that’s basically what I wanted to do when we came here. And Carol is not the only person who has sent books to us. I feel keenly about all these people. I can’t review all of the books and I haven’t done justice to what Carol wrote, but there are so many people who are like this. Just to have someone say, “I feel a little bit like, I understand a little bit what you’re talking about.” And it’s an act of courage even to say, “Would you order my book on Amazon?”

Karen:     Yeah, right, really.

David:     And the church is not all that great at it. Maybe when a pastor has been there for 20 years and they’re doing the farewell, there is a sense for you. Say this is like a standing ovation and maybe they do actually stand to their feet and clap for such an individual. But on a weekly basis, we need to be finding out what people are doing, which are struggles. I mean, it’s struggled to do the way God wants us to do in terms of our lives. I just wanted to have a picture of a standing ovation, which is kind of what I want the church to be like.

I took one of our grandsons who’s an adult. He’s a very smart grandson. He’s working for Intel and they’re helping him get his advanced degrees. So, we went to the school play where the youngest of our grandchildren, Annalise. Annalise is probably, what would you say, 10 now? They did their school production because Nathaniel lives in the Portland area, and he doesn’t come through to Chicago all that often. He doesn’t get a chance to see his cousins, especially his youngest cousins. So, it was important to me that as a part of his visit here, we would go and watch Annalise’s play. The play, I mean, it was amateur in every way.

Karen:     But they used every single kid in that grade school.

David:     It’s not that big. It’s a private school. They were all involved in one way or another and at the end of that play, I mean that place with all the parents coming in.

Karen:     And grandparents.

David:     It erupted. There were probably what, maybe 100, 120 people there, but I mean, it was raucous. And applause and yelling. I mean, the little kids were yelling like everything is spilling and jumping up.

Karen:     Flowers going up on the stage.

David:     Oh yeah, a lot of those the parents had brought. So, it was like, oh my golly, And Nathaniel’s eyes kind of got wider. Wow, this is really something. And I’m thinking of standing ovations. That’s the best reason when I’ve been to for a long time. And I thought, wouldn’t it be neat if in the church, there would be that constant understanding of the difficult lives of a lot of people living, yet they rise above it and they do incredible things.

Karen:     So, this podcast is devoted to Carol Niles in her book, The Hoarder’s Widow, order a copy. And we are standing here and say we appreciate the kind of work you put into this. Thank you for letting us know about it. We did order on Amazon a copy of your book.

David, he scooped it up and read it all and I’ve had to kind of scan it, but I will read it. And we just want to say to Carol, until people like Carol, who maybe have done something similarly and no one really has said hurrah or given them a standing ovation. Can’t hear us because it is a podcast, but we are standing here and applauding her with our own individual standing ovation.

David:     Okay.

Outro:     You’ve been listening to the Before We Go podcast. And if you would like to write to us, please send us an email at the following address, hosts@beforewego.show. That’s all-lower-case letters, hosts@beforewego.show.

If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please remember to rate, review, and share on whatever platform you listen. This podcast is copyright 2022 by Mainstay Ministries, Post Office Box 30, Wheaton, Illinois 60187.