Imagine if you grew up with a mother who compulsively hoarded things. Though many of us find it hard to picture, one man endured it for 17 years until moving out. Geoff Johnson finally returned to the nightmarish hovel 20 years after moving out, and what he saw was just as bad as remembers.
By the time he reached 17, there was no room for Geoff Johnson at home.
His mother started compulsively hoarding when he was a young boy, refusing to trash anything; unable to fix anything.
In his senior year, 1995, it was too much: he moved out.
Now, two decades later, he and his younger sister Jennifer McShea have returned to the family home in Omaha, Nebraska – and nothing has changed.
Geoff, 37, had visited his mother but only stood outside before picking her up to spend time elsewhere. Jennifer, also 37, returned just twice, on the advice of her counselor, to confront the deeply-embedded shame she felt.
But when their mother passed away following a 12-year battle with breast cancer in 2013, the house was handed to them.
Finally returning to the meticulous havoc, they were inspired to create a moving photo-series with their own children to document the reality of being a hoarder’s child.
Geoff, a photographer, wanted to picture his son and Jennifer’s daughter going about their daily lives among the trash – as they had done years before.
But the crumbling house is so unsafe, and their feelings still so raw, that they opted to use Photoshop and superimpose the children onto the images.
Regardless, the highly realistic results strike an uneasy feeling that Geoff says was so difficult to come to terms with.
‘It is difficult to describe the feeling of shame, the fear of embarrassment that you have growing up with a hoarder,’ Geoff, who is still based nearby in Omaha, tells DailyMail.com.