What Dr. Ruth Left Behind

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?”

But fear not: Dr. Ruth’s stuff will not all be thrown away. A few weeks earlier, a team from the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, where Dr. Ruth had arranged to donate her papers, had carted away 31 boxes. And now, they were back to pack up what ended up being 35 more.