This Is Uncomfortable September 26, 2024 Transcript

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Reema Khrais: It was the early 90s, and Mike Perry was in an awkward situation. Some friends—not even friends, really, more like acquaintances—they were moving out of town, but they couldn’t take their dog with them. So they asked Mike, would you be willing to take him? 

Mike Perry: I was reluctant because I, you know, I could barely take care of myself. I didn’t really want any more responsibilities. Uh so I’m good. 

Reema: Mike was a twenty-something in New Orleans living the life of a twenty-something: kinda messy, partying a lot, you know, just getting by. A dog didn’t fit into that life. Besides, his landlord didn’t even allow pets. But these people were desperate. They couldn’t just abandon the dog. They begged him. They were like, look…

Mike: “Can you at least hold him for a couple of days? Because we’re leaving town tomorrow. We’ll make some phone calls. We’ll find somebody to take him.” 

Reema: Mike felt bad. It wasn’t easy for him to say no. So he said ok, fiiine, he’d take in the dog. But only until they figured out a permanent solution. They thanked him profusely, swore up and down that it was really only for a couple days. And pretty soon, a black mutt trotted through his door. He was a sleek, medium-sized dog with perked up ears.

Mike: And so, they leave, and this dog is there, and the dog just kind of hops at the end of the sofa, and I’m at the other end of the sofa. And I look at him, and he looks at me, and then he looks away. And so I kind of, I’m watching TV, and I look over, and he’s looking at me, and as soon as he sees me, he looks away. And then I, then I, then I looked at him again, and he’s a little bit closer. I didn’t see him move, and, uh, I looked away, I’m watching TV, I turn over, and he’s, uh, he’s a little bit closer still. And every time I would turn away, he would just slowly ooze closer to me, until the next thing I know, he was like right up on my lap.

Reema: He’s like cuddling with you.

Mike: Yeah, I mean, it was like scientifically calculated to kind of just make my heart break.

Reema: A couple days later, Mike gets a call…

Mike: They called me about having somebody. I’m like, “No, yeah, no, you’re not getting it back.” [laughs]

Reema: Mike would reach a point where he couldn’t imagine life without this dog. The cruel reality though is that our pets come with an expiration date… always sooner than we’d like. But what Mike didn’t know was that this dog would be a big part of his life even beyond the grave… because of a fateful combination of money, the internet and a lot of luck. 

I’m Reema Khrais, and you’re listening to This Is Uncomfortable. This is our second episode exploring the intersection of grief and money. And this week, we’re looking at it through the lens of our pets. 

I should say though that Mike’s dog story isn’t your typical dog story. It’s still very sweet, you’re still going to wonder,
“who saved who?” But it takes a turn – a financial turn – we’ve just never heard before. 

And then later in the show, is there such a thing as too much when it comes to our vet bills? I talk with my Marketplace colleague Kimberly Adams about how much she was willing to spend during her cat’s final days.

Okay, but first: back to Mike…

If Mike’s life was a romcom, this is the part where the screen cuts to a montage of him and his new true love. We see them doing everything together—running around in the park, playing fetch…

Mike: “Playing fetch” is an understatement. This dog could catch anything in the air, leaping, leaping like, like acrobatically.

Reema: This comes up a lot with Mike—his enchantment with the dog’s ability to catch anything.

Mike: If you threw a ball, he would run out in front of it before it hit the ground, to where he could leap and catch it in the air at the maximum apex of his height, and then, like, do a little 180 and come back down.

Reema: It was like watching a BMX rider testing out new tricks. Soon, Mike and the dog were inseparable—together as he crunched out his work as a computer programmer, together on the couch at home, together during Mike’s band practice, where the dog would lie in the middle of everything, guitar cables wrapped around his paws. It was almost like the dog actually understood what was going on around him—like he had a certain wisdom about him. So that’s what Mike called him, Wisdom. Wiz for short.

Mike: His base talent was this perception, was this kind of empathy that was almost human-like. He knew what my moods were, my feelings. He knew when I needed space. He knew when I needed comfort. He was, he was just perfect in that respect. He just read me. Like nobody ever had.

Reema: He was really attuned to your emotions.

Mike: Yes

Reema: Everyone could tell Wisdom was special. When Mike’s friends were traveling, they would write postcards addressed to him…the dog, not Mike. It was like Wisdom had formed a new center to Mike’s life, filling a void he didn’t even realize had been there. And if it all seems a little intense—all this fuss over a dog—it’s worth taking a step back, to better understand Mike.

Mike grew up as a latchkey kid in the 70s, moving all over the country after his parents divorced, always the new kid at every school. He was bullied…badly. And life shuffling between parents had its own problems…

Mike: You know, when you’re, when the only time you hear from a parent is on your birthday, and you just get a letter with like a 5 bill in it or something like that, that can really make you feel like you don’t have any value when the entities that brought you into this world don’t act like you’re important to them.

Reema: Once, when he was staying at his dad’s place, Mike found a report card in the mail. It had some bad grades—Cs and Ds. He figured his dad would be angry if he saw them, so devised a little plan…

Mike: There was a spot in the basement that was unfinished, which just had like the fiberglass insulation, and I took my report card and I slid it behind the fiberglass insulation and just left it there, and I figured if my father ever said anything then I would show it to him. And, uh, he never asked.

Reema: The next report card came in. It wasn’t bad, but Mike stuck it in the same spot. He wasn’t hiding it, per se…just stowing it away for when his dad asked to see it. But…months, years passed, and he never asked.

Mike: It just became kind of like a running thing. Well, if you don’t care what’s going on with me, you know, why bother? And I’d stick them into the wall.

Reema: If there’s anything worse than fearing your parent’s anger, it might be discovering their indifference. Mike learned to stick to himself. And as loners often do, he discovered company in machines…

Mike: the early computers, you turned them on and you got a prompt, you know? It didn’t do anything. It didn’t bombard you with unlimited entertainment and information. You had to kind of program the computer. They were designed for you to create stuff with.

Reema: It was magical, the fact that you could take this benign box and tell it to do things. Mike became fascinated by all sorts of machines. When he and his mom moved to Louisiana, he found a pinball arcade a few blocks from his house.

Mike: We’re talking about electromechanical machines. There’s no digital scores or TV screens. It’s all mechanical. And they’re always clacking and clicking. And there’s, bells going off, and chimes going off. So it’s a very intoxicating sound, to a child.

Reema: He could spend hours there alone, transfixed. The arcade was an introvert’s playground. In a world where people let you down, it was best to turn inward.

And years later, as an adult, that’s still how he felt. But slowly, without Mike totally realizing it, Wisdom was creeping into his belief system and shaking things up. Maybe he didn’t have to go through life alone. With Wisdom around, it was like something clicked for Mike. And soon, lots of things were going well. He was selling software to major companies, making some money. He was full of ideas, full of ambition. 

Mike: so I got into the internet in the very early days, and I partnered with a friend of mine to start an internet service provider. And I focused on this cool thing called the World Wide Web.

[MONTAGE:

Newscaster: It spans the globe like a superhighway, it is called internet!

Newscaster: Millions of Americans own a personal computer. If you’re one of them you can know glimpse the future with nothing more than a modem, a phone line, and a few dollars a month.

Schmidt: Every business, no matter how large no matter how small, will be on the internet in the year 2000.

Reema: The world was catching up to what Mike and his fellow computer nerds had long known: the internet was big. Around this time, Mike started to register domain names. You know, like dot coms and dot orgs. Every time he had an idea for a project, he’d snatch up a domain. He got nerd.com, survey.net, folk.com, and…of course…wisdom.com.

Mike: Now, in the early days of the internet, all you had to do was fill out a form. You didn’t even have to pay anything. They were free. Nobody attributed any value to these domains. You could just grab whatever you wanted.

Reema: He eventually programmed wisdom.com into a simple page that generated quotes. Like, inspirational quotes. You can actually see it on the Wayback Machine—if you go on the old website, you’ll see a blank window, pretty sparse, with a quote right in the middle. Mike would find all these random quotes and collect them —little bits of inspiration or philosophy for how to live. He even started to write out his own quotes and pepper them into wisdom.com

Mike: Like I had one that was like, um, “Life is like a tree, every branch ends the same, with its limbs outstretched and its leaves opened up, trying to touch the light it will never reach.” … “You can’t steal second base and keep your foot on first.” … “Loyalty and diplomacy never share the same bed.” … “We all have journeys we must take. The most important ones involve no physical distance whatsoever.” … “True love is a byproduct of an unselfish desire to understand.” I might or might not have been smoking a lot of pot when I wrote some of these!

Reema: [laughs]

Reema: These quotes, they’re like a little time capsule of Mike’s state of mind in his 20s. They’re earnest…a little cynical…a little cheesy…but he was figuring himself out, deciding who he wanted to be in the world. And for a few years, life was just swimming along. Work was going well, girlfriends came and went, and Wisdom was there through it all.

Then, about 6 years into their love story, Mike got invited on a fishing trip with some friends. That morning, he noticed Wisdom was acting a little funny, pining more than usual. But he didn’t make much of it—he got himself out the door before sunrise, figured he’d come back that afternoon to take Wisdom for a walk.

Mike: Um, then when I came back, that’s when I found him, he, and he, he, you know, the whole living room was just completely in shambles. 

Reema: There was furniture turned over…drum set turned over…it was a mess. Instantly, Mike knew something bad happened. Wisdom had had a seizure. He’d suffered from seizures almost since Mike had adopted him…had been on medication for it for years. But this time, Mike wasn’t there to help.

Mike: He had probably just been flopping around or running around, and there was like foam everywhere, you know, cause he was foaming at the mouth, uh, and had had a grand mal seizure and I guess passed away. And, um, I, you know, I just did what I had to do: I, um, I picked him up and, and buried him and I buried him in the backyard in this, in this little corner. And, um,  you know, that was it. It was just, that was the beginning of a very dark time for me. 

Reema: Mike blamed himself: he kept thinking, if he had just been there, he could have held Wisdom, kept him from hurting himself during the seizure. It would have been traumatic for anyone, but for Mike, it was like something in him just snapped.

Reema: Did that surprise you?

Mike: Oh yeah, yeah. Um you know, when he was gone the, the, the sound of the house was different. Everything was different. Um. And I, I didn’t realize how important he was to me until I didn’t have him there. 

Reema: Mike spiraled downward. He started drinking more, leaving the house less. He was barely staying solvent. He knew he was being self-destructive, but it was almost like he wanted to suffer. This period of grief, at first it lasted weeks…then months…then years. In the end, 2, maybe 3 years into this depression, it was a single phone call that finally helped Mike resurface.

Mike: One day, I got a phone call from some kind of casual acquaintance that just said, “Hey, are you all right?  You know, I just got the vibe from all the stuff you’ve been posting that, you know, maybe things aren’t okay.” And it was one person that wasn’t even a close friend, that just noticed it. It’s just stupid like that. Some tiny little thing that just woke me up. And then from there, I just kind of got back up on the horse. 

Reema: From that moment on, Mike started getting out of bed in the morning. He adopted a new dog. He rejoined the living. And life sometimes happens that way, doesn’t it? One phone call, one flash decision, one little thing can reshape your entire path. Which brings us to the early 2000s…

Reema: So, how did the first offers for the domain come to you? 

Mike: Um, it’s always via email. Somebody sent me an email, “Hey, are you interested in selling this domain name?”

Reema: It was the height of the dot-com bubble—this meteoric rise in the stock value of internet companies. Big tech companies realized there was money to be made in buying up domain names. 

Mike: They would pay quite a bit of money to grab these generic domain names. And it was little nerds like me who grabbed them early on.

Reema: Now, Mike had sold a handful of his domain names over the years—a few thousand bucks here, a few there. But now, somebody was asking about wisdom.com. And Mike was not having it.

Mike: And so I would just always turn the offers down, and they would come in, you know, 3,000, 5,000, 10,000, 15,000…

Reema: Wow!

Mike: …which is a lot of money…

Reema: Yeah!

Mike: You know, but, but I looked at it like, if you gave me $15,000, it wouldn’t, it wouldn’t affect my life in any significant way. I wasn’t rich by any means. I, I mean, I was technically living close to the poverty level. 

Reema: What was your primary reason for saying no? 

Mike: Um, I really liked the domain. It had sentimental value to me. It was an homage to my companion dog that I lost. You know, it was the last little bit of Wisdom that I had, and I just wasn’t interested in selling.

Reema: Look, I get it…kind of. For Mike, wisdom.com was more than just a domain. It’s almost like his diary and the headstone to his best friend at the same time. It was one of the last traces of Wisdom he had left. He couldn’t just sell that.

Mike: Again, I, I grew up not necessarily knowing how to give or receive love. You know, when you grow up in an environment where people are not saying I love you, there’s no hugs, there’s no family meals, there’s no reinforcement that we are a solid unit that can count on each other–um, I just never assumed that anybody would want to hang out with me. So for a long time, what I needed more than anything else was to feel like I was important to somebody. And he, he made me feel that way. 

Reema: And did you feel that love towards him in a way that you hadn’t felt towards a creature or human before? 

Mike: Uh, up until that time, probably, but it’s hard to qualify these kinds of things. And it’s all one-sided, you know, you need to ask him. He’d be like, “Yeah, he was just some dude I was hanging out with, man.”

Reema: ha ha

Mike: “Dude, I did tricks for that guy. He needs to move on with his life!” 

Reema: Ha ha ha ha ha.  

Reema: Maybe, as the offers kept coming in, Mike felt Wisdom’s presence, giving him a gentle nudge to move on…let go. Or maybe there’s just a point where sentimentality gives way to practicality. Either way, as the numbers got bigger, Mike felt his resolve waning.

Reema: Then do you remember the first offer that gave you pause?  

Mike: somebody offered 50,000, I thought, well, definitely a lot of money. And I remember telling, you know, asking my, telling my family about it and my mother’s like, “Are you nuts? Sell it, sell it!” And I’m like, “Eh, I don’t know….”

Reema: Stilllll on the fence at 50 thousand…

Mike: 100, 150, 200.  225, 250, 300…

Reema: Stop!

Mike: I mean, it kept going up like that. And, uh, when it got past 250, I started to go, okay, we may be onto something here… 

Reema: I guess it’s a good thing he waited. Six-figures?! That was life-changing money. He could pay off his mortgage and his debts. 

Mike: So that’s when I said, okay, “If we did this, how would this go down?” 

Reema: At this point, he contracted a broker to help him facilitate the deal. The number kept getting bigger and bigger…

Mike: And then suddenly contracts started flying back and forth, and it was a very rapid thing.

Reema: There was a buyer who kept coming back after every “no,” until Mike finally said, “Yes, you can have wisdom.com.” With the help of the broker, the deal went into escrow, and before long, Mike was holding a little check with a very big number. 

Mike: I go into the bank, and I say, “I’d like to open up an account.” And the woman says, um, “How much do you want to put in it?” And I said, “475.” And she goes, “I’m sorry, sir. The minimum amount is 500.” And I said, “500,000?” And she said, “Wait, you meant 475,000?”

Reema: Four hundred seventy-five thousand dollars for wisdom.com. 

Mike: And I said, yeah, she’s, hold on a minute. And she just, she disappears from the front, goes into the back. And the next thing you know, there’s like a parade of bank employees coming out. It was like a scene from the Beverly Hillbillies, you know? “Ah, this is so and so. This is our vice president. This is our president. I’d like you to meet the, you know, Hey, would you like a coffee mug, a…”

Reema: They roll out a red carpet…

Mike: Yeah, T-shirt maker. I remember. I walked out of the place with my hands full of like little, you know, corporate emblazoned trinkets.  

Reema: The first thing Mike bought with his money was two nice leather sofas for about 2 grand.

Mike: They’re right, they’re still behind me. I love them. 

Reema: Then, a hot tub for about 3 grand.

Mike: I still have it in the backyard, and it works! Everybody should have one of those. They’re great.

Reema: He was saving money for the first time in his life and living large.

On the one hand, this is a story about one of the dumbest ways you could stumble into half a million dollars. Imagine that from one day to the next, you go from living paycheck-to-paycheck and being saddled with debt, to being able to afford nice sofas and hot tubs. 

But on the other hand, and bear with me here, this is a story about stumbling into grace. When Wisdom died, it was as though Mike’s most important teacher of love and devotion just vanished. But Wisdom had more wisdom to offer Mike beyond death. 

Eventually, Mike used some of the money from the sale to buy up an old abandoned church in New Orleans, which he filled with pinball machines.

Mike: I grew up not really having a good circle of friends or a sense of community, so I fabricated one.

Reema: It’s an amazing space—there’s a disco ball, purple lighting, and antique pinball machines lined wall to wall, some nearly 100 years old. Members can come, play some pinball, and just hang out and have a good time. Wisdom’s been gone now for more than 20 years, but Mike still feels his presence. 

Mike: That’s one thing I found about dogs: they don’t carry a whole lot of baggage. They slow things down, they slow time down. They make you realize, this moment that you’re just about to pass over, there’s some stuff you can get out of this moment: little bits of joy, little bits of comfort, serenity, tiny little microdoses of kindness. Don’t take those for granted.

Reema: Yeah, yeah. Like there’s this unharmed goodness within them.  

Mike: And they make us realize that we have that within ourselves, too. But we’re so preoccupied with making money and surviving and being afraid of things that we let that part of our existence atrophy. 

Reema: In some ways, Mike is still that introverted kid playing at the pinball arcade. But now, he has the wisdom to know that sometimes, life is better spent in the company of loving friends. 

After the break, a reality check: for most of us, our pets are not a cash cow. I talk with Marketplace host Kimberly Adams about the difficult financial decisions we face as our pets age. 

[AD BREAK]

Reema: Welcome back. Some of you might know Kimberly Adams– she’s Marketplace’s senior Washington correspondent, and co-host of the Marketplace podcast “Make Me Smart.” She’s also a friend of mine… and a fellow catowner. I have an orange cat named Simsim (which means Sesame in Arabic). 

Anyway… earlier this year, Kimberly’s beloved cat Jasper died. As his health declined, Kimberly faced some difficult decisions about how much to spend on vet care. I invited Kimberly on the show to talk more deeply about money and the love we have for our animals. 

Reema: I don’t think we’ve talked about this topic in particular together. 

Kimberly: No just everything else. [laugh]

Reema: Let’s start off and just talk about Jasper. 

Kimberly: Aw, Jasper.

Reema: I know, I know. How are you feeling?  

Kimberly: I’m still very sad. I think I’ll see, like, movement out of the corner of my eye, and, like, look for him and it’s, like, a reflection from, like, a car going by or something like that. And I’m like, “Aww, Jasper.” I’m still pretty sad. 

Reema: Of course. 

Kimberly: Although it’s weird because I only had that cat for, like, four years. I think I got him in July of 2019. 

Reema: Kimberly got Jasper after she’d just lost her previous cat Sultan to cancer, which took a real emotional toll on her during an already difficult time. 

Kimberly: And so I had that cat put to sleep, um, and then I was super duper bummed and like really sad, and my therapist at the time was like, “Get another cat,” because it was within a year of my sister dying. And I remember being just like really overwhelmed with grief and guilt because I felt like I was grieving the cat harder than I grieved my sister, and it felt terrible. I was like, I’m a horrible person! And I remember my therapist pointed out to me, she said, you know, “How often did you see your sister?” And I was like, “A couple times a year.” And she was like, “You were with that cat every day for seven years, makes sense that you would feel that more keenly,  even though that was your sister and you loved her and you grew up together, you know, as an adult, you haven’t been around this person, um, very much for years. And this was the thing that was there  in all of your downtime for seven years. So, like, that’s why you’re feeling it so much more. And also why you need a new cat.”

Reema: So Kimberly took her therapist’s advice and started looking for another cat. She specifically wanted an adventure cat– a cat with a lot of energy and curiosity, the kind that you could take outside on a leash. 

Kimberly: I wanted to like be like out in the world with the cat. So I go looking for a Savannah, and savannas cost thousands of dollars. Like they are so expensive. They can range from like, 15, 16, 18 hundred dollars. And some of the like really, really purebred ones can be like $25,000.

Reema: Jeez!

Kimberly: And I was like, Who’s out here paying $25,000 for a cat?

Reema: I don’t understand. I’m actually Googling this because I like can’t believe it. Yeah, you’re right. Wow. $25,000. 

Kimberly: Yes.

Reema: It’s wild. Okay. So you’re like, “Nope. Okay. Not doing that.”

Kimberly: Not doing that, but I did find, like, the Savannah Cat Rescue site, and I saw someone posted Jasper. And I thought he was so cute. He looked like a little miniature snow leopard. 

Reema: He was ten years old, but Kimberly was sure he’d have an adventurous retirement. So she went to the rescue, and took her Jasper home.

Kimberly: Jasper then proceeded to hide from me for almost a solid month.

Reema: Oh no. So this was not an adventure cat.

Kimberly: This was not an adventure cat. He hid in so many places, like my friends and I spent hours trying to find him. I have a 9800-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment; there are not that many places to hide. Slowly but surely, he started warming up and then, you know, I don’t know. Then we were best buds.

Reema: How would you describe his personality?

Kimberly: He was in retirement, that’s how I would describe him. He was in retirement. He was chilling. Then he decided he wanted to be the star of “Make Me Smart,” and so every time we’d do the live stream, he’d like jump on the bed and make himself known and stare at Kai.

Reema: That’s cute! He would just be like, “This is my show.”

Kimberly: This is his show. And the, the audience loved him so much from his live stream appearances that we actually made, uh, one of our fundraising gifts, a wine tumbler with Jasper on it. 

Reema: Oh wow…

Kimberly: So you can get a “Make Me Smart” wine tumbler with Jasper on it. It says, “Make Me Smile.”

Reema: He was a celebrity, a Marketplace celebrity.

Kimberly: He was a little celebrity cat.

Reema: As the years passed and Jasper’s fan base grew, his health started to decline. He was 14 when things got noticeably worse. 

Kimberly: He started having a runny nose, and just like a runny nose on one nostril.  And so I took him to the vet, and they were like, “Hh, that’s weird… but you know, maybe it’s just an infection.”

Reema: If you’ve had a senior pet, you know how this goes– the diagnoses start to pile up over the years: asthma, arthritis, diabetes. And then new issues start to enter the mix, ones that are more difficult to explain or treat. 

Kimberly: So fast forward $1200-worth of testing and examinations and shots in that visit, and that was on top of the, like, $600 I’d spent on the previous visit. And so…

Reema: This is just to figure out what’s wrong?

Kimberly: This is just to figure out what’s wrong. And I didn’t have pet insurance for Jasper because he was too old to get it when I got him. So this is all out of pocket. And I remember, like half an hour before the “Make Me Smart” live stream on a Friday, the vet calls me. And she was like, “The test results came back pretty bad.” The long story short was, she wanted me to put him in the emergenc– take him to the emergency room and have him spend the weekend in the emergency room getting stabilized.

I said, “Well, what are they going to do with the emergency room?” And she said, “Well, you know, he’s losing a lot of fluids, and he’s dehydrated, so they are gonna, like, put him on IV fluids. And they’re gonna run a whole new batch of tests.” And I’m thinking to myself, a) this is a cat that’s scared to go outside, much less, you know, go through that; and also, this is at least $3000 minimum, uh, to go to the vet for the weekend. And so I like, you know, I was like, I have to go and do this live show. I can’t make this decision right now. And so I like pulled myself together. I did the “Make Me Smart” live stream, and… 

Reema: Geez, that must have been so hard.

Kimberly: It was hard. It was hard. Because I kind of knew at that point that this was not going to end well. And so I called her back after the show and I said, okay, look, I’m not putting him in the ER for the weekend. Let me have an appointment for like Monday or Tuesday and we can talk next steps. Then I spent the weekend just watching him very, very closely. And I realized that he was not only like eating very little, but he was drinking so much water and just it was going straight through him. Everything was going straight through him. 

Reema: Aw…

Kimberly: Yeah and he was just miserable. And so we basically just kind of like laid up in the bed all weekend together and I just pet him. And that was when I decided I was like, okay, I’m not doing this anymore. And so I canceled my vet appointment, and I made the appointment for the vet to come and euthanize him on that Tuesday.

Reema: Okay, wow. So, just to back up, um, that was the number they had given you, $3000?

Kimberly: No, I just ran it in my head.

Reema: You just knew that it was going to be a lot of money.

Kimberly: I knew it was going to be a lot of money, and that would have been just to stabilize him. And at the end of the day, he was 14 years old with not just one problem, but multiple. And I had decided after Sultan… 

Reema: Sultan is the cat she had before Jasper, the cat who died from cancer.

Kimberly: …that if I were to get another cat, I was going to set a threshold of where I was gonna stop, because I felt like I made that cat suffer. There’s this idea like you don’t want money to be the reason that you don’t allow your animal to live, but I kept him probably suffering longer than he needed to. Because he was miserable at the end, and I’m like trying to like force medication down his throat. And I was like, this is dumb, and it’s mean. And so I made the decision pretty– when I saw Jasper starting to get sick, I told myself, I was like, when the costs start creeping up past $5000, that’s when I need to just, like, let it go.

Reema: How did you choose that number, $5000?

Kimberly: Um, I think that was sort of around where I ended up before I made the decision with Sultan, and I was like, what is also responsible for me financially? And what is kind for the animal? And like, at the end of the day, it’s a cat, you know? It’s like, that sounds kind of callous. But um…

Reema: No. Yeah, it’s, um, it’s, it’s difficult to talk about because it feels wrong to essentially put a price tag on your pet. Um, because then I also think it forces you to create this kind of hierarchy of who or what else is important to you in a way that also feels unfair. Like, oh, I can’t spend $2000 on my cat or my dog who I really love because I need to store that money away for a future child’s tuition or for retirement. It just like, it pits the things that are most important to you against each other, and it becomes, like when I think about it, this kind of like gross math problem, that you don’t want to confront. 

Kimberly: It’s a really gross math problem. You know, I think one thing worth, um, adding is that this is a very privileged conversation to have, right? 

Reema: Yeah.

Kimberly: There are plenty of people who love their animals so much and would spend the money, but can’t. And so the fact that I’m even able to sit here and be like, “Here’s how much I choose to spend to keep my pet alive,” it’s probably going to be really jarring to some folks who wish they had the option. Um, and like, I, I feel that. 

Reema: Yeah. No, I think that’s a great point to make. 

Reema:  So, all of this led you, from what I understand, to learn more about one reason costs might be going up, why it’s so expensive to care for our pets.  

Kimberly: Yeah.

Reema: Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, what’d you discover? 

Kimberly: Well, I saw several articles around the time about private equity moving into the pet care marketplace, and how these private equity companies are buying up veterinary offices all over the country and then prices are going up. Or people are reporting that their doctors, their vets are like upselling, or encouraging people to do more and more procedures for animals that in the past you never would have done. You know, it used to be that if you had a cat or a dog and it had cancer, you probably wouldn’t know until the animal died. But now, every vet has access to an MRI, and that starts at like, you know, two grand or something like that. And so the cost of care is going up, it’s getting harder to get insurance, or people who do want to get pet insurance may find it unavailable or super expensive, and then you’re in the vet and you find out that this creature that is your buddy needs, you know, thousands of dollars worth of care. What are you gonna do?

Reema: I know.

Kimberly: It’s rough. 

Reema: Yeah I’ve noticed, like I couldn’t tell if this was just my experience – I mean, clearly, this is affirming, talking to you about this and also doing some research beforehand – realizing that vet care has just, the costs have gone up across the board because, yeah, recently we had to get dental surgery for Sim Sim, um, and we threw down at least, like, $1500.

Kimberly: Yep.

Reema: Um, which just feels so ridiculous. And it’s like, oh, we might have to do more teeth later on, which will be like another 1500. And reading about how private equity companies are coming in and, you know, basically, uh, making pet clinics more profit-oriented…

Kimberly: Doing what private equity does! 

Reema: Yeah exactly, doing what they do. Like, I think investors know how much people are willing to spend on their pets, and they’re capitalizing on that.

Kimberly: You know what it reminds me of? Weddings and funerals, right, where these are things where the markup is so incredibly high on things because people know that when you’re in that mindset… 

Reema: We’re going to spend!

Kimberly: You’re kind of, you’re going to spend. I know people who, you know, have spent tens of thousands of dollars on their pets and extended their life and felt it was worth it, you know? And… 

Reema: Or they’ll go into debt. Plenty of people go into debt.

Kimberly: Lots of people go into debt. Yeah. Yeah. And I didn’t, yeah, I just didn’t want to do that. And also I didn’t want to watch him suffer anymore. He was miserable.

Reema: Back in May of this year, as Jasper’s health was rapidly declining, Kimberly shared the news with the listeners of the Make Me Smart podcast. Here she is on the show with Marketplace’s Amy Scott. 

Kimberly on MMS: Long story short, Jasper is not going to be here much longer, friends of the show. So I’ll grab him and put him on camera, so you guys can see him. 

Amy on MMS: Oh buddy…

Kimberly on MMS: There’s Jasper. He’s pretty sick.

Reema: You got an outpouring of response from listeners. 

Kimberly: Oh my gosh, so much.

Reema: Um, what kinds of things, yeah, what were they telling you?

Kimberly: Oh my goodness, thought that like sharing that, that I might get a little bit of judgment of like, “Oh my gosh, how can you put a price on your pet?” Or like, “Why didn’t you try this? Or why didn’t you try that?” Or what I was really worried people were going to say is like, “Oh, I wish you had said something. I would have adopted him and then I would have paid for this, that, and the other.” 

But instead everyone was just like, “We get it, we’re so sorry, that must be so hard.” Or they would share their own stories about like how they had to make the decision for their own pets, or how they were in a situation where they wished they could have spent the money but they didn’t have it and so had to put a pet to sleep, or, you know, give up a pet or they, um, or how they spent a lot of money on a pet and then it wasn’t worth it. And most people were like, better to do it sooner rather than later. You know, we do this for ourselves, not for the animals. And it’s not a good use of money. Um, and… 

Reema: That’s validating.

Kimberly: Yeah, it was super validating, and there were so many stories. People were really, really kind.

Reema: Yeah, I saw that a Marketplace listener even donated in Jasper’s memory.

Kimberly: Yeah. Oh my gosh. That was so nice. I actually just put a thank you card in the mail for that person yesterday because I thought that was so kind.

Reema: Since we talked, Kimberly brought home a kitten named Artax, who recently made his debut on the “Make Me Smart” show. 

Artax on MMS: Meow!

Kai Ryssdal on MMS: Oh my lordy be, and the cat, too.

Kimberly on MMS: Here I brought the cat back with me.

Kai on MMS: There you go.

Reema: I’ve been thinking a lot about what Kimberly and Mike shared with me– how grief and love get so intertwined and make it hard for us to make decisions about money. Like if you asked me today, what’s the max amount I’m willing to spend on my cat Simsim, I don’t know if I’d have a number. And it’s funny cause growing up I was actually afraid of cats, like I wasn’t much of an animal person at all. But when I adopted SimSim at the beginning of the pandemic, she quickly became this much needed source of companionship and pure joy. I don’t want to think about her final days, let alone how money might play a part in that. 

I imagine that Mike Perry felt the same way when getting offered money for Wisdom.com. There’s something about our pets that leads us to make choices that might seem irrational to someone else. But as Kimberly told me, once you start sharing about this particular kind of grief, more people than you might expect will say, “I get it.” In fact, studies show that the grief we feel at the loss of a pet isn’t that different from what we feel when a person we love dies. It makes sense. Our pets witness the smaller moments in our lives that no one else will ever see. It’s a rare kind of intimacy and acceptance that feels impossible to quantify. 

Alright that’s all for this week’s show. If you’re wondering btw what happened to wisdom.com, it’s actually up for sale again. Unclear how much it costs this time around, but if you end up buying it, let us know! 

Before we go, be sure to check out our weekly newsletter, always great recommendations in there for how to spend your time. If you’re not already signed up, you can do that marketplace.org/comfort  

And one last thing: I have an ask for you, to help with our upcoming anniversary episode… What’s something that you’ve learned from listening to “This is Uncomfortable” over the years? Or how your relationship with money or work has changed? What the show has made you think more deeply about? We basically want to hear from you and include it in the episode, so record a voice memo and email it to us at [email protected]. Or call and leave us a message at 347-RING-TIU… that’s 347-746-4848. Either way, you’ll want to include your name and where you’re calling from, and there’s a good chance we’ll include it on the show.

Camila Kerwin: This episode was co-produced by me, Camila Kerwin, and Alice Wilder, with support from Reema Khrais. I wrote and produced Mike’s story… and Alice produced the conversation with Kimberly. 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.

And special thanks to Kramer, June, Simsim, Lazy, and Nemo… the beloved pets of “This is Uncomfortable.” You can see pictures of them in this week’s newsletter– that’s at marketplace.org/comfort. 

Reema: Alright, we’ll catch y’all next week! 

Mike: He’d be like, “Yeah, he was just some dude I was hanging out with, man. Dude, I did tricks for that guy. [Reema laughs] He needs to move on with his life.”