Archivists from the Kinsey Institute are helping the family of the sex therapist Ruth Westheimer with a common quandary: How much of someone’s stuff

What Dr. Ruth Left Behind

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2025-01-10 17:30:02

Archivists from the Kinsey Institute are helping the family of the sex therapist Ruth Westheimer with a common quandary: How much of someone’s stuff do you keep?

When Ruth Westheimer died last July at 96, she was celebrated as a pioneering sex therapist, cultural gadfly and consummate Manhattanite — described once as a 4-foot-7 cross between Minnie Mouse and Henry Kissinger, to use a much-repeated description, who changed the way we talk about our most intimate lives.

But there was another area where Dr. Ruth, as she was known to nearly everyone, distinguished herself: the accumulation of stuff.

“My mother was a pack rat to the nth degree,” her son, Joel Westheimer, said on a recent afternoon, looking around the apartment in Washington Heights where she had lived since the early 1960s. The modest three-bedroom apartment with expansive views of the Hudson River was half-cleared, yet still somehow crammed with books, papers, photographs, awards and tchotchkes.

He pushed aside a stack of framed items. “There’s a lot to go through,” he said. “Plus, it’s just weird to be throwing away someone’s life, you know?”