The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman's Extraordinary Life in Death, Decay & Disaster
Everyone told me that I must read The Trauma Cleaner and I have resisted till now and after reading it I too have joined the chorus and am telling you all that you must read The Trauma Cleaner if you have not yet discovered it. I listened to this as an audiobook, and I warn you that if you walk and listen then you will walk further than ever as you will want to listen longer.
This is the story of Sandra Pankhurst and also the story of operating a trauma cleaner business. A trauma cleaner cleans crime scenes, but Sandra’s business also cleans the homes of people who are broken, those who have long since stopped coping, and cleaning the homes of hoarders. Krasnostien, details these homes in all their squalor, and introduces us to the people who live like this, and how they interact with Sandra. Sandra approaches these homes and those that struggle to live there, with no judgement, with kindness and also with a ruthlessness to get to a point where the home will be clean. Trauma is the root cause of a lot of these people who hoard, let their homes be reduced to incredible squalor around them as they cease to cope, and seem to be dying slowly from incredible loneliness and shame.
"This is a story of hope, of recovery and of being who you are meant to be."
- Jane Cowell
This story is also one of Sandra’s trauma. Sandra had a terrible childhood. She was adopted through the Catholic church to a family in West Footscray, Melbourne with an alcoholic father who was extremely violent and a mother who was emotionally abusive. Sandra was forced to live in a shed at an early age that her father built, excluding her from the family home, denying her food and access to the bathroom. She was born male and her parents developed a hatred of her for being effeminate and a suspected homosexual.
Interspersed with the stories of the trauma cleans, we find out more about Sandra’s life and her journey from being a man, to her transgender life and ultimately to being a women through one of the earliest sex change operations in Australia. There are some tough and confrontational scenes for the reader to get through, and one can only imagine the resilience of Sandra herself as she had to live through the violence, the discrimination and the loneliness that comes from being rejected by those that are meant to love you. Ultimately though this is a story of hope, of recovery and of being who you are meant to be. Not a story for the faint hearted but it did give me more insight into mental illness, trauma and what it can do to your life and how you live. It also reminds us all to be slow to judge others and to always be kinder.