523: Death and Taxes

Ira Glass

In Janah Boccio's Health and Human Relations class, they're studying puberty now. And for the entire period, the sixth-grade boys are a squirming, moving, fidgeting, chatty mess.

[STUDENTS LAUGHING]

And can I say, as they get deeper into the material, they do not seem to see much of an upside to puberty at all, anywhere. When they notice that one of the books uses the word "enjoyable" to describe sex, one boy declares...

Ira Glass

And when Miss Boccio asked the boys if they're looking forward to any part of puberty--

Ira Glass

They said that shaving seems like it's going to be a drag, which, by the way, good call, kids. Several boys squealed that the illustration of pubic hair in the book looked like burnt macaroni and cheese. Near the end of class, one of the kids, Jack, told me that part of what's so freaky is that you just don't know when puberty is going to strike you.

Ira Glass

On the opposite end of the country, in Northern California, 10-year-old Paris was at a similar class, a class about puberty for moms and girls. And she described the approaching monster in different terms that got across pretty much the same idea.

Ira Glass

Paris told the reporter that she talked to, Marianne McCune, that she was one of the first ones in her class to hit puberty, which of course is not fun. Like most kids, I think, she did not like looking different from everybody else.

Ira Glass

A lot of kids feel this way. In these classes, they ask the teachers, why does this have to happen, and is there any way I can stay a kid? It's crazy to be told you can't do anything about this. It's coming. And when it happens, everything will be different. How many things in our lives are like that?

Well, today, on our show, we have stories of people dealing with the inevitable, trying to do their best, trying to stay themselves through these things that can be so confusing and potentially soul-crushing. And we're not going to mess around today with little inevitable things in life, with traffic and relatives you don't like and what happens if you never brush your teeth.

No, no, no. We're going to go with the big ones. We're going to go with two inescapable things that are absolutely certain. Act 1 of our show is about death. Act 2 is about taxes. These are two things that are unavoidable, that actually I think most of us don't know that much about. And today we turn to people who know more than us. Prepare to be surprised at what they say.

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act 1, Death. So we can only guess at what happens to us after we die, but we do not have to guess at what happens right before. Though most of us remain ignorant until we arrive at that moment ourselves, Nancy Updike found a spot where she could understand all this better. Here's Nancy.

Nancy Updike

Before I tell you where I went, let me tell you why I wanted to go. Four years ago, my mother's husband, Asa, was dying. She was taking care of him at home with help from a hospice. And I went to be with her and him for the last 10 days of his life.

He was this tall, very funny man with beautiful manners who adored my mother. I felt clumsy and helpless all the time in those last days-- with Asa, with my mom. I didn't know what to say to someone who's dying. I didn't know how to be. I'm sure that's true for lots of people.

I remember checking in on Asa one afternoon and asking him if he needed anything. He looked at me and said, I need everything. We both laughed. That was the closest I ever got to talking with him about what was happening.

There were people around who did know what to do, though-- the nurses. I watched them from my stupor of awkwardness. They never brought any false cheer into the room with Asa, which is hard not to do with a dying person. They were direct. When Jackie, the weekend day nurse, left the Sunday before Asa died, she said to him, is it OK if I kiss your hand? And then she said, God willing, I'll see you next week.

The nurses knew how to deal with us, the rest of the family, too. One of the nurses, Jenny, got me cleaning out the fridge one morning. We did it together for an hour and a half, just talking, passing the time. It wasn't until later that I realized, oh, she did that for me, to give me something to do. It was a strange feeling to know I was that transparent to her.

For the last hour of Asa's life, the people in the room were my mother, one of Asa's sons, Jenny, and me. We held Asa's hands. Jenny was standing, and she sometimes touched Asa's head gently. She told him, it's all right. It's OK. Your family is OK. Everyone is all right. Asa's eyes were open. They'd been that way all day. He was staring up and to the right, over our heads. He didn't see us. He moaned every once in a while, and we spoke to him when he moaned. The four of us watched his breathing slow down and get shallower until he was taking just sips of air.

When he was very close to the end, Jenny brought over a glass of water and a little dropper that we'd been using to moisten Asa's mouth. And she told us each to take the dropper and give him some water and say our names close to his ear so that he would know who was giving him each bit of water. As a ritual, it felt comforting and sad and vaguely religious. And Asa's son and I were both crying. I had no idea how badly we'd needed a ritual at that moment until Jenny gave us one.

I had never seen the kind of expertise these nurses had. They knew death. They seemed to understand it, whereas I-- even though I had just watched someone fade away and die right in front of me, all I could think was, what just happened?

But I didn't realize how much of a hold all of this had on me still until I heard a stranger talking a few months ago about how his mother is a nurse who works in a hospice facility, seeing people die almost every day.

And then he went on to say that after his mother had worked there for a few months, she forgot the president's name. And when she mentioned that to her boss, her boss said, yeah, that happens. That's normal here. Your brain is blocking out a lot of what you're seeing, and some other stuff is getting blocked, too. My first thought was, my god, of course. They're experts, not robots. My second thought was, I need to go to this place and talk to these people.

Nancy Updike

So this is Pattie Burnham. She's the one who forgot the president's name. That was five years ago, though. She's on top of it now. It's Barack Obama, by the way. Pattie is a registered nurse, and the place she works is an inpatient hospice about 30 minutes north of Boston called the Kaplan Family Hospice House. We're driving there now. Pattie's got a double shift today. I told her my whole backstory so she knows why I'm here.

Pattie is 5'8", blonde, full of energy, even though it's 6:00 AM. She's lived in this part of Massachusetts her whole life, worked at a hospital, then as a nurse at her kids' school. And then when they graduated, she was looking for another job, and she went to the Kaplan House.

Nancy Updike

Hospice can mean a building, like Kaplan, or home care, like Asa had. They both mean the same thing. The patient is not looking to be cured. It's palliative care for people at the end of their life.

The Kaplan House actually is beautiful. All the rooms have big windows. The lobby and main common area have vaulted ceilings and skylights. Nothing is covered in plastic. I overheard one family member of a patient say, the thing I like about this place is, there isn't a phony plant in here. All the flowers are real. There's a big kitchen for any patients who can still eat. Pattie speed-walks by.

Nancy Updike

This is not just a place for rich people with private insurance. Lots of patients are on Medicare or Medicaid. Kaplan House is run by a nonprofit called Care Dimensions, and the bulk of what they do is home care. Kaplan House has rooms for just 20 patients. And it's not full today, but Pattie is busy. She rushes between rooms and then slows down as soon as she steps inside one.

Nancy Updike

Pattie is talking to Crystal, the daughter of a 51-year-old woman named Lori who came to Kaplan House a few hours ago. She has lung cancer. It's metastasized to her brain. Lori is delirious, making sounds but not speaking much anymore. Her family has been taking care of her at home. They tell Pattie that Lori always liked to look good. She has a perfect red manicure and pedicure.

Nancy Updike

The questions do come up. Crystal comes and finds Pattie, and she does something I remember doing. Crystal starts out asking about one small, specific thing to try and get a handle on what's happening. She wants to know, what is the tube that's on her mother's face right under her nose? She asks so quietly it's hard to hear. But she says, what's that thing on her nose? She smells like bleach.

Nancy Updike

This question-- basically, what is that thing on my mother's face that is making her look and smell like she's not my mother? That's just the first in a giant, unsorted pile of questions about what's happening and why, and what am I supposed to be doing and feeling? Crystal says some of the family and friends in the room have been saying that no one should touch Lori.

Nancy Updike

From there, she tells Pattie, in one long, crying sentence, that people in the room have been telling her mother that it's OK to let go. And one of the times someone said it, her mother all of a sudden said, no. And what does that mean, since she's delirious?

And should I be saying it's OK for her to let go? In some ways, I wish she would let go so she wouldn't suffer anymore, but I feel weird even thinking that. And my mom has gotten close to the end like this a few times before, and then she's come back. And maybe that's what's happening. And some people in the room are saying you guys are drugging her so that she'll die faster. And I don't know about any of this. I don't know. Pattie listens to the whole thing and then jumps in.

Nancy Updike

I remember standing with my mother and one of Asa's nurses in the kitchen and having this conversation, the this-is-it conversation. There are so many stages to a long decline-- dips and resurgences and good days. And you know-- you know it's all the same thing. It's all dying. But there's a huge difference between dying and the very last part of dying, what Pattie and the other nurses call actively dying, a process that can take hours or even days. But it's different from what comes before. And being familiar with one doesn't mean you'll recognize the other.

I talked to Pattie later, and I asked her how she knows when someone is actively dying. How does she know it so well that she would say, I'd bet my nursing license that this is what's happening?

Nancy Updike

I talked to a palliative-care doctor who told me that the most important thing she got better at with experience was looking for openings that allow you to be helpful-- little windows, little moments. With hospice, part of that is trying to help people take in, bit by bit, the realness of what's happening.

Some dying people, no surprise, are not at all OK with the fact that they're dying. And they don't often get a chance to just say so. I saw a home-care nurse talking to a man, a former math teacher in his 60s. She was talking about antidepressants, asking him whether he was depressed. He thought about it, and he said, well, I'm not "jump out the window" depressed, more like, what the fuck happened?

Asa was a courtly man. I never heard him swear or even speak harshly in my life. But I could tell how frustrated he was sometimes by the sheer logistics of being a dying person, the imposition of it. Sometimes just the question, do you want this, seemed overwhelming. Dying is a constant series of judgment calls and decisions based on options that are very far from what anyone would want. And one thing the nurses are experienced at is trying to make the best of those narrow options.

Nancy Updike

Pattie is crouching next to a woman named Joanne, who's going home later today. She has lung cancer, and she's been getting hospice care at home. But her pain got worse, so she came to the Kaplan House for a few days of round-the-clock supervision while the doctors adjusted her pain medications.

People sometimes come in and out of Kaplan House like this. They're dying, but they still have time left in their lives. And the staff tries to get their symptoms under control-- pain or vomiting or whatever it is-- so that they can do more with that time than just be sick.

This room smells bad. It's strong. Joanne hasn't been able to shower in a little while. She said she has a hard time doing it at home. She's tiny in the bed, barely looking up, talking almost inaudibly. But her strength of will is intact. She knows the ambulance can't pick her up and take her home until later, but she wants to be home now, already. And anything that isn't going home is something she doesn't want to do, even though, a couple of hours ago, she was glad when Pattie suggested a shower, because it's much easier to do here when two people can get on either side of her and steady her.

Nancy Updike

Maybe you can tell where Pattie is going with this. I'd seen her taking care of Joanne and others all day, people clearly in the midst of some of the worst days of their lives-- afraid, in pain, sick of being sick. And it takes serious skills to be able to nudge somebody in that situation toward a thing that they don't think they want but are very glad when they get it.

Nancy Updike

Joanne's husband, Larry, had been sitting quietly in the room this whole time. He had agreed that a shower was a good idea, but he didn't want to push Joanne on it. And then he seemed happy when she decided to do it. Once she was in, both he and Joanne relaxed a bit. Joanne joked around with Pattie in the shower, and Larry got up to leave and go home to get the house ready for when Joanne got back. They've been married 27 years.

Nancy Updike

There's a note on the Medicare website about hospice, saying, hospice isn't just for cancer. I saw people at Kaplan House with other conditions-- end-stage dementia, congestive heart failure. But mostly I saw cancer. Asa had cancer.

At the Kaplan House, I realized I had questions about the physical part of what had happened with him. I saw other people who had that extreme cancer thinness I learned the medical term-- cachectic. It's from Greek words that mean bad condition. In a few rooms, I saw the same swabs, these little green sponges on the end of a stick, that we used to keep Asa's mouth clean and moist.

The swabs stayed with me because I remember being grateful that they gave us a way-- a small way-- we could care for Asa even after he'd stopped being able to tell us what he wanted. That was the hardest time-- for me, at least-- to hear him groaning and not know what to do or not do. We grilled the nurses about what they thought was going on and what we should do. And at the Kaplan House, I saw that a significant part of the nurses' jobs is trying to figure out what a person might need when they can't communicate anymore.

Nancy Updike

Pattie is back in Lori's room, Crystal's mother. It's nighttime. We're into the double part of Pattie's double shift. And Lori is moving around a lot in the bed. It sounds terrible to say, but I felt comforted to see it and to see others at Kaplan House do it, too, because I'd seen it with Asa.

Nancy Updike

Apparently, it's common toward the end. It's called terminal agitation. Lori's family hasn't slept in 24 hours because Lori was up all night last night, delirious, moving, sometimes trying to get out of bed, even though she's too weak to stand and could easily break a bone if she falls. It's exhausting to deal with and hard to watch.

The problem with agitation, as a palliative-care doctor told me, is that it isn't a diagnosis. It's something you see, but the person can be doing it for lots of reasons, each of which calls for a different approach. They could be constipated, anxious, in pain, some combination. A dying person is like a baby that way, except we know even less about a dying person's brain than we do about a baby's.

Some of the guesses we make are based on what we know from coma patients. But a dying brain is not a comatose brain. It's different. And in terms of what a dying person perceives, someone who's non-responsive, the science of it-- we know almost nothing. The nurses told me they assume that people can hear us right to the end, but no one knows for sure.

Nancy Updike

Lori's eyes are open, but it's that distant stare like Asa had. She's not seeing what's in front of her. Her mouth is open, and she's squirming in the bed. She was a sign-language interpreter, and sometimes she seems to be signing. But no one in the room knows what she's saying, if anything.

Nancy Updike

Pattie is right up close, talking to Lori, watching her face. It's something I saw the nurses do with Asa, too-- get right up close and talk to him and watch his face, even after he seemed to have stopped responding, because sometimes, suddenly, he would respond, especially to direct questions like--

Nancy Updike

--are you in pain? Lori gives a small shake of her head and says, no.

Nancy Updike

Pattie and Christiana, one of the hospice aides, put in a catheter, and the bag immediately starts filling up. Lori relaxes. The whole family relaxes. Or at least, they're able to give in to their exhaustion. Lori's girlfriend, Karen, finds Pattie in the hall.

Nancy Updike

This is the sister of another patient. She came straight from work to be with him and has been here day and night for two days. I've been talking to her a lot. I know the strain of this waiting, where nothing is happening, and your brain keeps flitting between the giant, existential thing that's going on and the tedious nuts and bolts of just getting through every hour. Every moment seems full of meaning and yet not meaningful at all. It's surreal, and it is crazy-making.

Nancy Updike

I never knew what anyone was going to say at the Kaplan House. Listening to family members in rooms and in the halls, I got the feeling that their brains were full to the brim with what was happening, and asking them any question tipped all their thoughts out in a rush.

Some people told me the whole story of their family member's diagnosis and treatment up to five minutes ago. I heard one of the doctors say to an 84-year-old woman who was sitting with her dying husband, you know him better than we do. Does he look comfortable to you? The woman responded by telling the entire story of their relationship, starting with, we met when I was 13.

The staff has a name for that kind of answer. It's called life review. They say it happens a lot. And I heard life reviews that were a lot darker than that one. Not every death is the end of a well-lived life. But all the stories seem to be trying to tackle the same huge question. How did we get here?

Nancy Updike

Pattie again.

Nancy Updike

Talking to people about whoever they were visiting at the Kaplan House always brought up other, earlier losses. Always. One woman who was sitting with her mother told me about how her husband had died suddenly eight years earlier, making her a widow at age 51. A woman whose younger sister was dying said she lost both parents before age 13.

A woman visiting her brother told me about how his daughter had died years ago at only two years old. The woman said her brother was so angry about his daughter's death that he said to her, his sister, why couldn't it have been one of your effing daughters? You've got two.

It was like a map. This death related to that death over there, linked to this living person here, a hidden geography shaping all of our lives.

After I'd been at the Kaplan House for several days, I ran into Larry, the husband of Joanne, the woman Pattie coaxed into getting a shower before going home. Larry was sitting alone in the main common area. I knew it couldn't be good that Joanne was back so soon.

Nancy Updike

One of the many ways I've been a smug idiot in my life was by disparaging the use of euphemisms for death and dying. I thought it was weak. Who would do that? By the time Asa was at the end, I had barely been able to utter the words "death" or "dying" for several months. I felt like the thing itself was only manageable if I didn't invoke it.

Pattie told me that one of her strategies for protecting herself at work is never to imagine herself in the place of the dying person or their family members. She tries not to picture her husband or her kids. I remember trying and failing at that.

I think part of my clumsiness around Asa and my mother was my barely-suppressed terror at the thought of my own husband dying. I pictured myself in my mother's place all the time. Every morning before going to her apartment, I pulled out a piece of paper, and I had to read the words on it out loud in order to make it out the door. "Your husband isn't dying. This is not about you. Your mother needs you. Go to her apartment now." It was my own little serenity prayer. God grant me the wisdom to know the difference between my fear and her reality.

When I heard a woman at the Kaplan House say to her husband, who was dying of colon cancer, something like, we had a really good run until the last few months, didn't we, baby? I had to turn away to go look at a lamp in the corner.

But I think death makes narcissists of us all at one point or another, even the pros. I was walking with a nurse named Kim. She worked in critical care for two-plus decades before changing over to hospice. We had just left one woman's room and were heading down the hall when Kim said, shaking her head--

Nancy Updike

Kim, and everyone else, said these are the cases that can be hardest to defend against-- the ones where you can't not picture yourself when you look at them. She had another just last week.

Nancy Updike

This is Juliet, one of the CNAs, Certified Nursing Assistants. She's studying to be a nurse, and she remembered the first time she had a patient her own age.

Nancy Updike

Sometimes they see patients their children's ages. This is Jackie, another nurse.

Nancy Updike

Jackie also told me, while I was following her around, throwing out questions--

Nancy Updike

And it does happen. A nurse named Rosemary, who's been there for a long time, told me about one of the other longtime nurses, Kathleen.

Nancy Updike

Death and illness, who's here and who's not, how we live with this hanging over us-- these are the conversations I'd been waiting years to have. Before I left, I got to ask Pattie what it's like to talk with her patients so directly the way that I was never able to do with Asa.

Nancy Updike

I asked Pattie if anyone at the end of that list says, well, I'm just afraid of dying. I fear death. She said yes. And she listens if they want to talk about it, offers to bring in the chaplain or the social worker. What else is there? That might be the biggest thing that she and the other nurses know that we don't. They know the limits of what they can do.

Ira Glass

Nancy Updike is one of the producers of our show.

Coming up, since the federal government can no longer count on cartoon characters to bring in our tax dollars as they once did, what is left for them? My answer is in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme. Today's program-- death and taxes, stories about the inevitable, stories where people who know about these things share their inside knowledge with us. In Act 1, we heard all about death. We have now arrived at Act 2, which is about taxes.

I think most of us think of taxes as inevitable like death. But in fact, while we all die, we do not all pay our taxes. According to the most recent statistics, the IRS only successfully collects 85% of the money that all of us owe, which is a lot of money. They miss $385 billion out of $2.6 trillion they should be collecting. Though when you think about it, what is amazing is how many of us actually do pay. There are entire countries where it seems like most people are cheating. Greece, I'm looking at you.

Here, we pay up, most of us, because of some combination of, A, we think we don't have a choice-- though if you'd bother to look into it, you would learn that the IRS does not have that many people checking on us-- and B, we think it's the right thing to do. NPR's David Kestenbaum has this story about how we got here and about one former IRS special agent trying, even in retirement, to help Uncle Sam in this quest.

David Kestenbaum

The first year the government tried to collect an income tax from broad swaths of Americans was during World War II. And really, it was unclear how well it was going to work. One poll showed that one third to one half of people weren't sure what they were supposed to do.

And the government faced this choice. There were basically two options. The government could play tough, say this is the law. You have to pay. It could scare people. Or it could try to inspire people to pay their taxes.

We went with inspire. We chose a spokesperson who could sell the income tax, someone with credibility, someone who was instantly recognizable and easy to understand.

David Kestenbaum

We went with Donald Duck. This is a short film by Disney from 1942, commissioned by the government. In it, Donald Duck is marching around his house patriotically, listening to the radio, and talking back to it.

David Kestenbaum

Donald Duck runs and gets a gun and a sword and an axe and boxing gloves.

David Kestenbaum

They walk him through filing his whole tax return.

David Kestenbaum

Donald Duck writes in occupation-- actor. Income-- $2,501. He lists his dependents, three-- Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

David Kestenbaum

They have him look up how much he owes in the tax tables.

David Kestenbaum

This film was nominated for an Academy Award. And remarkably, this approach worked. Millions of Americans became responsible income taxpayers for the first time. Of course, when you're fighting the Nazis and you've got Donald Duck making the pitch, it's an easy sell. During the war, almost 90% of Americans polled said their taxes were fair. After the war, that plunged to around 60%.

These days, some of us aren't so convinced of our duty. A recent survey by the IRS showed something like 1 in 10 people felt it was OK to cheat a little here and there or as much as possible on their taxes.

This is the taxpaying world that Al Drucker discovered when he started working for the IRS in 1981. He'd just graduated from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and he was hoping to land a job at the FBI, or maybe the DEA, chasing drug traffickers. But the way things worked is, you just took this general aptitude test, and you waited to see who called. And the call he got was from the IRS.

David Kestenbaum

Al didn't really even know the IRS hired law-enforcement people. But he took the job. They trained him to shoot a gun. They taught him special driving pursuit skills. And they gave him an impressive-looking badge that said Special Agent Number 4158, with the seal of the US Treasury on it. And he got to work.

One of Al's first cases came from a tip. It was a tip about a guy who ran a pharmacy in New Jersey. Someone had told the IRS, hey, you should check this guy out. I'm pretty sure he's cheating on his taxes. So Al, with a colleague, went to the pharmacy.

David Kestenbaum

Even in retirement, Al still speaks like a cop-- things of this nature, the suspect, the informant. Anyway, Al and his partner walk into the pharmacy, and the pharmacist is there. And they get the strangest reception.

David Kestenbaum

Which, of course, he might have been. Someone, after all, had ratted him out. That was why Al was looking into this guy. And it was probably someone the pharmacist knew pretty well.

David Kestenbaum

The insider tip. It was a powerful thing. Al looked into the pharmacist's bank records and pretty quickly found something fishy. The guy didn't seem to be depositing any cash. All the money came from checks and credit cards. And clearly, people had been buying gum and newspapers and greeting cards with cash. Where was all the cash going?

David Kestenbaum

A lot of cases are like that, he says. The fraud is right there once you start looking. But you need a reason to start looking. In this case, it was the tip that gave him that reason.

Tip, of course, is a nice word for it. Ratting out is another. But this notion that good ideas could come from people telling on each other-- it stuck with Al. So a couple years ago, when he retired from the IRS, he set up a business built around this idea, that people could help the government do its job collecting taxes by volunteering information. And here, for once, he did not give it a cop-speak name.

David Kestenbaum

The IRS does have a way you can rat or squeal on other people. But like all things IRS, it's a pain.

David Kestenbaum

There's a hotline. But if you call, you get this.

David Kestenbaum

Of course there's a form. You have to print it out, fill it out, and actually put it in an envelope and mail it to the IRS in Fresno. TaxSqueal.com, Al says, removes the hassle and provides an extra layer of anonymity. You just go to the website, type in some answers-- basically, who are you squealing on, where does the person live, what did they do? And that's it. Al will file the form for you for free.

Al works out of the back of a store his wife runs in a New Jersey strip mall. The store is a little hard to describe. One side, literally one side of it, is devoted to sports memorabilia-- jerseys, photos, baseball cards. The other side is window treatments--

David Kestenbaum

--making this, I think, the only store in America where you can buy baseball cards and window shades and squeal on your neighbor. Al works at a desk in back with his old badge, now preserved in a Lucite block, and some squeals he's printed out. When enough of them pile up, he mails them to the IRS.

Al says the IRS-- despite what you might think, it's not all powerful. When he worked there, the IRS had only around 3,000 field agents doing criminal investigations. They are massively outmatched. So the IRS faces this fundamental problem. How do you find the cheaters?

Al's answer, rat them out-- it may sound unpleasant. But it turns out this is one of the oldest tricks we've got. During the Civil War, we had an income tax on the rich for a while. And the government made it so that you could see exactly how much everyone was paying. The idea was that neighbors could rat out the guy next door if he lived on a big estate and didn't seem to be paying much. Squealing was the original form of tax enforcement.

The IRS today has a whistleblower program where they reward people for turning in big fish. Last year, the program paid out $53 million in awards. For smaller squeals, you can print out that form, fill it out, and mail it in. Or there's TaxSqueal.com.

David Kestenbaum

Al reads through some of the stuff he's gotten through his website. There's someone squealing on jai alai gamblers in Florida. There's a retired sheriff ratting out a hair salon. There's one angry one in all caps, and a woman saying her ex-husband is claiming the kids as dependents when she's supposed to be. Actually, Al says there are a lot of exes-- ex-wives, ex-friends, ex-employees.

David Kestenbaum

Al doesn't check the validity of these allegations. He doesn't look into them at all. He just prints them out and mails them in. But if you want to pay just $2, Al does offer one extra service. For $2, Al will mail a little postcard to the person you've squealed on. Postcard is yellow with big black letters that read, you've been squealed on, exclamation point. On the back is a legal disclaimer saying, Tax Squeal is not a government entity, and explaining the Tax Squeal mission. He shows one to me and producer Chana Joffe-Walt.

David Kestenbaum

Honestly, I was conflicted about all this. It felt kind of wrong, but I can't say why. Maybe it's that if you turn someone in, you worry that bad things are going to happen to them.

One time I was in this little corner grocery store, and I saw this woman shoplifting. And I went back and forth about whether I should say something. In the end, I did. But my heart was pounding. And as I left I heard the store owner confronting her, and I just felt awful. Squealing-- it doesn't feel like something to be proud of. An Al-- even Al-- he's got complicated feelings about it.

David Kestenbaum

Al's Tax Squeal business is not going as well as he'd hoped. The tax attorneys he thought would pay to advertise on the website? They didn't really materialize. And that $2 "you've been squealed on" postcard service? Most people don't do it. Most people, it turns out, are like Al. They don't want to squeal. Sure, there are lots of vindictive ex-employees and ex-spouses out there eager to squeal, just maybe not enough to support a business. Al says the postage alone is killing him.

Ira Glass

David Kestenbaum. Normally you can hear him on NPR's Planet Money. Their absolutely free, deeply informative and entertaining podcast is at npr.org/money.

Ira Glass

Our show was produced today by Chana Joffe-Walt with Alex Blumberg, Ben Calhoun, Sean Cole, Stephanie Foo, Sarah Koenig, Miki Meek, Jonathan Menjivar, Brian Reed, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Production help from Alison Davis. Seth Lind is our operations director. Emily Condon is our production manager. Elise Bergerson is our administrative assistant. Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our website. Research help from Michelle Harris and Julie Beer. Music help from Damien Graef.

Special thanks to doctors Jane DeLima Thomas, Charles DeCarli, Jimo Borjigin, and Lisa Sanders. Thanks also to Bo Burnham. And thanks especially to the staff of the Kaplan House and Care Dimensions, to the patients and family members who spoke with us. Thanks to the Churchill School in New York and the Lucile Packard Children's Hospital in Palo Alto, where we interviewed kids about puberty. Our website, ThisAmericanLife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International.

Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. He just joined a new health club, and they have a sauna. And he cannot shut up about how great it's going to be when I join.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.