This Is Uncomfortable September 19, 2024 Transcript

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Amanda Petteruti: Dementia in my opinion takes your worst qualities and turns them up to 11.

Reema Khrais: Last year, Amanda Petteruti had to watch her dad suffer from dementia. It was painful, seeing him become confused, argumentative, no longer the affectionate dad reaching for hugs.

Amanda: And that’s so hard for the people you don’t want to remember the aspects of them that were the most challenging, you want to remember the ones that were joyful, and playful, and yeah, it sucked. A whole lot. We tried memory care, but he declined really quickly, um, and eventually he just passed. So, it was a tough… 

Reema: That’s really hard

Amanda: It was a tough year. 

Reema: Her father’s death brought not just grief, but a to-do list. Her mom made phone calls, informing everyone of the news, they organized a wake, filled out paperwork…hunted down important documents. And then Amanda, her mom and her brother started going through his stuff, all the things he’d accumulated during his lifetime. 

Amanda: He definitely kept stuff that was like, what are you doing? We threw away, like, the toilet seats that he’d kept for 20 years. I don’t know why.

Reema: Huh. Wait, toilet seats?

Amanda: Yeah, I have no idea why he did this. I have no idea why. We just kept finding more stuff! 

Reema: They sifted through his collections of sci-fi novels…of t-shirts, all his stamps. And then…they opened a closet door… 

Amanda: And there’s stacks of these toolboxes and suitcases.

Reema: Picture a closet stacked wall to wall with old school suitcases, and toolboxes, all secured with locks. 

Amanda: And they’re heavy so it’s not like I could be like, Oh, let me scoot these over so I can come in here.

Reema: Her dad had put those boxes there. Amanda had noticed them even when he was alive, but she knew it was best not to ask questions. The family understood that certain things of his were off limits. 

Amanda: It was his. It was Ross Pettarudi’s. It was not anybody else’s, and it was not up for discussion. We all knew that if even in his cognitive decline, knew that we touched those, oh there’d be hell to pay. 

Reema: But now with her dad gone, they had no choice but to unlock those boxes, to see what he’d been so closely guarding…  And what they found inside would rattle Amanda… it’d change the way she thought of her family’s finances, and the way she grieved her dad. 

Amanda:  I knew there were all these boxes. I didn’t know just how much he was spending until we started seeing invoices.

Reema: I’m Reema Khrais, you’re listening to This is Uncomfortable. This is the first of a three-part miniseries we’re doing around money, grief and loss. We’re going to get into some uncomfortable questions…like how should you prepare for your own death? Should you set a limit on how much you’ll spend on your pet when they’re sick? And what do you do when you discover that a person you love took financial secrets to the grave? 

That last question is one that Amanda brought to us. She’s a listener of the show, and she emailed us about this predicament she’s in…dealing with all the stuff her dad left behind, and the difficult emotions and questions they brought up for her. 

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never really thought that much about the things we will leave behind one day. Like not just money or big things like a house or a car. I’m talking about the journals and trinkets we push under our beds or in the back of our closets, the stuff we lock away for no one else to see. 

Talking with Amanda, I was reminded of how much losing someone you love can change you. and I also learned how dealing with the aftermath, with all of their literal baggage, can change your relationship with them…. even after they’re gone.

Reema: Amanda has this way of talking about her dad that just pulls me in. You can really imagine him. Like there’s the story of when she was a kid and she came home with a school assignment: to turn a wire coat hanger into something else. 

Amanda: I must have come home and been like, I don’t know what to do with this. He didn’t drink at all, but in his mind, I’m sure it was like, “Here hold my beer, I got this,” and he fashioned this thing into this beautiful goose, perfect like little jowls and feet, stands up on its own. 

Reema: Wow. 

Amanda: Yes, out of a coat hanger! The teacher must have been like, nice job, Amanda.  

Reema: Yeah, I know you did that.

Amanda: Your dad gets an A haha

Reema: Her dad was a problem-solver. A creative guy who could figure it out himself. He was a second-generation Italian American who worked as a manager at a paint shop. As Amanda puts it, he was a working-class guy from Rhode Island who wore his blue collar proudly. 

Amanda: Like when I say to you, tell me what you think people are from, are like from Rhode Island, probably you’re going to be like, Oh, Newport and people that wear like shorts, pink shorts with little embroidered lobsters on them. Right? Like

Reema: Actually, yes. Yes, that’s right. That is an image that comes to mind. Yeah.

Amanda: Yeah. So  that is like, true and real, but not where I grew up. I was just having this conversation with somebody recently, or they’re like, what? “Whoa, whoa, whoa, what? There’s Rhode Island rednecks?” Yes, it’s real.

Reema: Her dad didn’t aspire to be one of those people with lobster shorts and a country club membership. He was the guy wearing cut off shorts and LL Bean work boots no matter the occasion.  

When Amanda was a kid, growing up in the 80s, she knew her family was working-class. She’d overhear her parents arguing over money. Her mom worked nights at a jewelry factory and would hand over her paychecks to her husband. 

Amanda: He controlled the finances, and she was like paying him money. She was totally resented that.  

Reema: And with Ross Pettarudi in charge of the money, every dollar was accounted for. None to spare on frivolous things. Vacations? Too pricey. The high-wasted jeans Amanda wanted? A waste of money. And until she was 15, Amanda slept in the dining room. 

Amanda: Because there wasn’t a bedroom for me.

Reema: No privacy for her  teenage self to cry to alternative music in peace. That she could deal with. But there was one injustice that felt too difficult to accept. 

Amanda: I wanted to take dance lessons, so badly. I wanted to dance. Oh my goodness, and they were like, “Nope can’t afford that, here’s your brother’s glove. Go play softball, kid.” 

Reema: Softball became a big part of her and her dad’s relationship. They had this huge backyard – three acres where they’d play catch.

Amanda: We wouldn’t necessarily say a whole lot, but sometimes we did. That kind of, we were there together, but also apart. 

Reema: Yeah.

Amanda: There’s a distance. Cause you can’t play catch unless you are at least a little apart. Otherwise you’ll hit each other in the head. 

Reema: And so you felt that distance throughout  your childhood? 

Amanda: Not as a kid. As a kid, I was like, climbing on my dad, hanging out with my dad, my dad, my dad, my dad. But yeah, I mean, it’s like, the playing catch metaphor is still like, you’re there, you’re cooperating, we’re doing the same thing, but you know, when you grow up, too, we had to be further apart to play catch because I could throw harder so…yeah,  

Reema: And what was that distance as you grew older? What was that about?

Amanda: Um, I think it was very much that I wanted something different than this, like this blue collar existence that we had. 

Reema: Amanda eventually left Rhode Island. She became a data analyst, started her own family and settled in the DC area. As her life changed, she stopped visiting as often, phone calls got shorter. Certain topics like politics were off limits. It was like a rift had opened, but talking about it would mean making it real. 

After her dad’s death Amanda visited home often, sorting through papers and his collections of toilet seats and stamps. But she kept avoiding those locked boxes.  

Amanda: Opening these boxes is opening a can of worms. 

A couple of months after her father’s death, her mom and brother finally cut the locks off and opened the boxes. And inside they found….

Amanda: Hundreds of coins.

Reema: Brass coins. Dollar coins, Coins from the 1800s. Mercury Dimes. Mint coins that had never been circulated… 

Amanda: There were eight to ten toolboxes…

Reema: Oh wow!

Amanda: … filled with these coins 

Reema: Many of them, like the mint coins, were still in these plastic containers…. 

Amanda: Others were like almost in like, um, they were bound in like a book. Some even look like expensive jewelry cases.

Reema: Oh, okay! This is way more meticulously organized than I was imagining. Okay.

Amanda: He did not like inventory them in a way that we would be able, like, like, we would find all these, like, handwritten notebooks, but none of us understood what the heck it meant. He did, but we didn’t.  

Reema: Amanda and her family also had no idea what these coins were worth. 

Amanda: Every once in a while you hear, like, a crazy story where someone, like, found a million dollar coin and, like… And, and so we just, you know, we didn’t know!

Reema: Amanda and her family knew that they didn’t want to just sell the whole collection at an estate sale, like what if they had one of those million dollar coins? But also, it wasn’t realistic to go through and assess the value of hundreds and hundreds of coins one by one. She was frustrated. After months of dementia care, of grief…of sorting through paperwork, she now also had to unpack her dad’s secret hobby? Amanda had questions, like why did her dad build this collection? How much did he spend on the coins? What do we do with them now? Amanda was busy with a full-time job, and her mom, who’s in her 80s, was overwhelmed with other tasks. But avoiding the problem only caused more anxiety. 

Reema: How did these toolboxes of coins change your grieving process? 

Amanda: It was like we’re going along, going along, and then there’s this like spike of resentment and frustration and kind of anger a little bit, that I didn’t want.

Reema: Yeah. 

Amanda: And I felt guilty about it. I still feel guilty about it. Um. Yeah, I was just like, I think I was annoyed about that, annoyed with him about that, too. You can be annoyed with somebody who’s not around, right? Like, like you, like you, Dad, like you, why?  Why is this our responsibility?  You’ve put a speed bump in my grieving process. I realize it sounds like sort of self centered, but it’s… 

Reema:  No that makes so much sense,

Amanda: Yeah, yeah, we’re super  frustrated  and annoyed. I think my mom would say the same, too.

Leah Petteruti: I was in a state of shock, I could not believe he had so many coins. 

Reema: That’s Amanda’s mom, Leah Petteruti. I called her one evening when she was in their Rhode Island home, she’d just finished eating a steak dinner in front of the TV. She told me that she knew her husband Ross had a thing for coins, but had no idea that for decades, there were hundreds of them tucked away in her house. And then the shock, the confusion, it all compounded once she discovered the invoices. 

Leah: I don’t know why he was spending that kind of money because we never had money. 

Amanda: We were seeing that like, you know, 1985 he’s dropped a hundred dollars on these proofs. Do you know, like how, like how far a hundred dollars could go in 1985? Like, far, kind of far!

Reema: They can’t know for sure how much he spent on coins over the years, but they both told me they feel confident that it was thousands of dollars. Thousands of dollars that could’ve been spent on the family instead. 

Leah: One time Amanda wanted to know why we didn’t go on vacation like all her friends went on vacation. And, you know, Ross would say, “Well, we don’t have that kind of money.” But, unbeknownst to me, we did.

Amanda: He was spending all this time and money on these coins and then turning around and being like, “No, you can’t have jeans. No, you can’t go to dance class. No, let’s argue about the groceries.” It was like he was having an affair with these coins.

Reema: That’s an interesting way of putting it, that he had an affair with these coins. So it’s, with the implication being that he had a love for this hobby that  superseded, at least it feels like it may have superseded…

Amanda: Yeah.

Reema: …the love that he had for his family,

Amanda: This **** came first, is how it felt.

Reema: Amanda was grieving her father, the charming man with a sharp edge. The dad who built her a doll house and taught her to love softball as much as he did. But now her brain was trying to make sense of this new information: how he could also be a dad with secrets, how he might have acted in ways that felt counterintuitive, even hurtful. 

Every now and then you’ll hear stories like this – how people discover secrets about their loved ones after they’re gone, from unpaid debts and gambling addictions to love affairs and second families. These discoveries force people to rethink someone they thought they knew in this really lonesome, maddening way. Like, you can’t yell at them. Can’t give them a silent treatment, knowing you’ll eventually make up and forgive. I can get how that would only intensify the anger you already feel over their loss. It’s like that feeling of being trapped in a bad dream. You know what you want to do, but you physically can’t. You can’t rebuild trust with someone who’s gone. 

One of the only things you can do is shift your perspective. And as I talked with Amanda, I could hear her trying to do that. About an hour into our conversation, as she was talking about why her dad had refused to spend money on the family while still sinking money into these coins, she paused mid-thought…

Amanda: You know what, Reema? As I’m saying this aloud… I wonder sometimes if the thing that came out of his mouth was, “We don’t have the money for that,” but the real reason had more to do with identity and pride and, yeah… And, and like, the money was just an excuse.

Reema: She was reflecting on the fact that growing up, she slept in the dining room…but not because they didn’t have an extra room upstairs. They did, it just wasn’t finished. Her dad – being a builder – put up all the drywall, laid the floor, but hadn’t made the finishing touches. And he refused to hire someone to do it. So the room stayed empty for years while Amanda slept in the dining area. 

Amanda: And I realized that he viewed this as like a thing that rich people do. Rich people hire somebody to do it.

Reema: But he was too proud to do that, it sound like. 

Amanda: That’s right. I bet you money that if that if I really, if I ever really had pulled the string with him, he would have said that, like, “You’re not doing dance lessons because my working class child does not take jazz.” [laugh] Mm mm. “But we play softball in this family.”

Reema: Why do you think that is? Did he have a disdain for rich people?

Amanda: I wish I could ask him, I could, and there’s like this like laundry list of things that, like, I don’t really know.

Reema: If Amanda had to guess, she thinks her dad felt so protective of his working class identity because he grew up in an area saturated with wealth – and he responded to that by saying “well, I don’t want to be like you anyway.”

I can’t help but think of how similar it is to the way Amanda responded to her environment when she was younger, when she tried distancing herself from her blue-collar background. They were both doing the same thing, but in opposite directions. Both trying to find a sense of belonging in this world, even if that meant moving farther apart. 

I could hear the frustration in Amanda’s voice soften as she turned this rubik’s cube in her head, trying to piece together her dad’s motivations. But even with these realizations, Amanda still felt burdened by the coins. And she still had more questions: why spend so much money on them in the first place? And how much were they worth today? That’s after the break.

[MIDROLL BREAK]

Reema: When I talked with Amanda’s mom, Leah, about discovering her late husband’s coin collection, she had a response that surprised me, but that also made a lot of sense. After the confusion and the shock wore off… fear took over.

Leah: I was petrified that somebody was going to break in and kill me for that money. That’s an awful thought. But that’s how I felt I had no idea what it was all worth. No idea whatsoever.

Reema: Truly, no one in the family besides Ross Petteruti could’ve told you the value of those coins, like they could’ve been worth a million dollars or a hundred.

Talking with Amanda and her mom, I got curious about the world of coin collecting and I learned a few things. It’s a pretty popular hobby. There are coin shops across the country where you can buy and sell coins, and coin shows where people show off their collections. Experts say that collecting coins and precious metals tends to rise in popularity during times of economic uncertainty. Around the time Amanda’s dad started collecting coins – the early 1980s – the price of precious metals was at an all time high, and the U.S. was in a recession.

Just because investing in coins is popular doesn’t mean it’s easy to make a profit. It requires a ton of research. And like, a book or website might say a coin is worth $300, but if no one will buy it at that price, then you aren’t actually making a profit. There are of course exceptions, like in 2021, a Double Eagle coin sold at auction for 18.9 million dollars. But most collectors will never get that kind of payday. 

There was no way for Amanda to go back in time and change how her dad spent money. So instead, she set to work selling her dad’s coin collection. She arranged for some collectors to meet with her mom. But her mom quickly got overwhelmed, and anxious that maybe they were taking advantage of her. So Amanda looked for another collector, someone her mom could trust. She found this older woman who approached them with a lot of care.

Amanda: Almost like a therapy session. 

Reema: This collector showed up at their house and connected with them emotionally. She understood how difficult it is to sell something that meant a lot to someone you love.

Amanda: The thing I remember more than anything is some relief about, like, finding somebody that got it. 

Leah: She really knew what she was doing, you know. She was out of here in a couple of hours. 

Reema: The woman went through the collection, coin by coin, and bought most of it to sell at her coin shop. After months of agonizing, they finally got rid of those heavy, locked boxes. 

Reema: Did you feel lighter after you sold them?

Amanda: I do, yes, yeah *breathe* like just let go…we can let go of this….

Leah:  Phew, it’s done. It’s, it was like a relief. 

Reema: So how much money did they end up getting? 

Amanda: It was like 14 thousand and change. 14-thousand dollars. It was not  millions, but it wasn’t nothing, right? 

Leah: I thought we had a million dollars there, I really did. 

Reema: How did you feel when you found it was 14-thousand? 

Leah: A real let down, you know, I thought they’d be worth a lot more. It was a real shocker.

Reema: what did you end up doing with the money?

Leah: Um put it in the bank.

Reema: She also gave some of it to her two kids, and the money helped make up for the spending Leah did shortly after her husband died.

Leah: I got a new rug, I got new curtains, I got new shades for the bathroom. I had the hall painted, and I put a new floor in the kitchen. The kitchen was the one room I always wanted done, and he never did do it. 

Reema: It’s been almost a year since Amanda’s dad passed away, and she’s still trying to reach for answers. Like she wishes she asked him the most obvious question: 

Amanda: Why these coins? Why…this? I have theories. 

Reema: Yeah what are your theories?

Amanda: I think,  I think as he got older, I really believe that he thought of these coins as an investment strategy. And I, the reason, one of the reasons I think that is because he, like… He would have been in his forties when the company he worked for took away their pensions and was like, “Okay, no more pension. Now everybody’s going to have a 401k. Good luck.” And I think that he didn’t trust institutions. It’s like, like there’s this, this sort of double whammy of like, you pulled the rug out from under me and now I don’t understand this 401k thing you’re telling me that I have to use. And moreover, the stock market sure does seem like a rich people thing.

Reema: Mmhm. I know I was connecting that dot. 

Amanda: Yeah.  

Reema: That would make sense.

Reema: The more Amanda thinks about it, the more she can see things how he might have. Her dad was a perfectionist who didn’t want to rely on anyone else. He taught himself how to care for his 1970s Barracuda, how to bleed the brakes and fix the headliner. In his 60s, he took up bowling and had among the highest scores in his league. And every Saturday night, he’d fill a bucket with softballs and practice his pitch. 

So it would make sense that for him, collecting coins wasn’t just a casual hobby. Amanda imagines he saw it as a way to hack the system, that maybe it would allow him to leave a fortune behind for his family.

Amanda: That was his mind. That was how he operated. Like, I will figure this out, um, and I will be good at it.

Reema: Yeah. When you interpret it in that way, if that theory is correct, does it allow you to release some of the anger? 

Amanda: In some ways…I still am irritated, a little irritated with him that he made that sort of unilateral decision. Um. But he did it from a good, like, he did it from a kind place, which that part of it is like, “Okay, dad, like, I see what you’re trying to do.” 

Reema: Therapists will tell you that grieving is a strange thing, those stages we learned at some point in our lives? you know going through anger, denial, bargaining, depression and then acceptance. That’s not really how it works. It’s unpredictable, one day you might feel totally fine, the next you’re filled with anger, and that night, you can’t stop crying. Even in my two-hour conversation with Amanda, I could hear in her voice just how many emotions she cycled through. Each time she got angry, I noticed it was triggered by the coins. She felt anger because they felt like a burden…but part of the frustration was directed at herself. 

Amanda: I just wish that we had done the kind of sifting through his stuff that… I wish we had done it together. If I had sat with him, If I just stopped and made the time, I was like, oh, I was so busy, and we had done this same kind of exercise with these coins, or with these books – he kept all these books, like old science fiction books. Like, what, tell me what this is, dad, tell me, tell me the story here, like, make the memory come up, and so it doesn’t go away with you… unless you want it to. Maybe you want it to.

Reema: Yeah. Yeah. 

Amanda: You know, it’s like our stuff, Reema, is so part of, it can, ends up being part of who we are, and it’s, like, sad at the same time, cuz it’s just stuff.  

Reema: Yeah.

Amanda: Or you assign…  

Reema: They carry so much meaning, and at the same time, they can feel so hollow.

Amanda: Yeah, right, right.

Reema: That was one of the things I thought about the most after talking with Amanda. How after someone dies, their stuff – the things they cherished the most – that purple glass vase on the kitchen table, the hand-knotted wool rug in the bedroom, or the stack of vintage comic books from high school – they rarely hold meaning for anyone else – unless you share that with them. Even then, does anyone else really want all of those things? It’s why in the last year Amanda’s been on a purging spree. 

Amanda: I can’t change things that happened in the past, but I can manage my own crap. The stuff that’s worth something and means something to me, make sure that the people that I care about know what it is.

Reema: Yeah. 

Amanda: The stuff that’s like superfluous, and like I don’t want someone else to have to deal with, why make my son deal with it? 

Reema: She’s gotten rid of clothes, pictures, toys her son has grown out of.  But there are a few things she’s still holding onto. Like she kept two small boxes of her dad’s coins for herself. 

Amanda: It’s like this direct line to him, because he was probably the last person that touched them. 

Reema: Yeah.

Amanda: So every time I hold the mercury dime, and turn it over and admire the little wings on the side of her head, it’s like, my dad was the last one that did that.

Reema: Yeah. That’s special.

Amanda: It is! 

Reema: Yeah.

Amanda: It’s funny, Alice had asked me… 

Reema: Alice is our producer. 

Amanda: like, if I have something of my dad’s that I particularly treasure, and it was funny because my answer was this like funny goose that he made out of a coat hanger. But then I was like, I hung up with you, Alice, and later on, I was like, no, you know what? It is actually these stupid coins. It is these ****ing coins! I hate them and treasure them at the same time. 

Reema: I love this realization from Amanda. It feels honest. When we lose the people we love, it’s tempting to want to preserve an uncomplicated, pristine memory of them. But grief isn’t a beautiful goose…it’s confusing, heavy and takes a long time to sort through, with some treasures tucked inside. You know, like a box of coins. 

Alright that’s all for our show this week. If you want to reach out with any thoughts about this episode, you can always email me and the team over at [email protected]. Also be sure to check out our weekly newsletter – always great recommendations in there for how to spend your time, things to read and watch and listen to. If you’re not signed up for that already, you can do that at marketplace.org/comfort. 

Alice Wilder: This episode was produced by me, Alice Wilder and hosted by Reema Khrais. We wrote the script together. Zoë Saunders is the show’s senior producer. Jasmine Romero is our editor. Sound design and audio engineering by Drew Jostad. Bridget Bodnar is Marketplace’s Director of Podcasts. And Caitlin Esch is Supervising Senior Producer. Francesca Levy is the Executive Director of Digital. Neal Scarbrough is Vice President and general manager of Marketplace. And the theme music is by Wonderly.

Reema: All right, I’ll catch you all next week.

Amanda: Probably my life is better for playing softball, but in the, in the multiverse, there’s an Amanda that danced, I’m sure. [laugh]