You Stay.

By Eric Chunn in CURATED COLLECTION — Nov 21, 2025

Capital Thinking • Issue #1204 • View online

I have a metal filing cabinet in my office. The bottom drawer is locked. No one touches it.

It’s not full of files. It’s full of old, cracked leather collars. Thank-you cards written in crayon. Blurry photos from the 90s. A single, dirty tennis ball from a golden retriever who saved a kid from drowning. A clay paw print from a cat that used to sleep on a gas station counter.

I open it sometimes, late at night, when the clinic is dark and the only sound is the hum of the refrigerator. I open it when I feel myself getting hard. When I start to see the patients as invoices and the owners as problems.

I take out that drawer. And I remember.

It wasn't always this way.

The bill was $14,000. The dog was a nine-year-old rescue mutt. The owner was a 24-year-old girl in a coffee shop apron who was visibly shaking.

She looked at the estimate, then at me, her eyes hollowed out by panic. "I have $500," she whispered. "My car payment is late. Can... can I make payments?"

That's my job now. I’m not just a veterinarian. I'm a financial counselor with a stethoscope, deciding who gets to live based on a credit score.

It wasn't always this way.

I once stitched up a cattle dog’s throat with fishing line on the tailgate of a rusted-out Ford pickup. The owner, a farmer who smelled of diesel and desperation, held a flashlight in his mouth and wept like a child. That was 1983. No sterile field, no anesthesia but a flask of whiskey, no credit check.

The dog lived. That man still sends me a Christmas card, even though the dog’s been gone twenty years and the farm was foreclosed on a decade ago.

I’ve been a vet for forty years. Four decades of blood under my nails, fur on my clothes, and the smell of fear in my nostrils. It used to be you fixed what you could with what you had—not what you could bill.

I started in ’85. Fresh out of Cornell, still had hair, still had hope. My first clinic was a converted barn off a gravel road in upstate New York. The roof leaked, the phone was rotary, and the heater only worked if you kicked it.

But folks came. Farmers, factory workers, teachers, and truckers. They didn't have much, but they paid what they could. Mrs. Gable paid for her cat’s spay with six jars of strawberry jam. Old Man Hemlock paid for his hound’s arthritis medicine with a cord of firewood for the winter. We didn't have financing plans. We had trust.

We gave shots. We set bones. And we gave peace when it was time.

When it was time, we knew. There was no "alternative protocol" someone found on a blog. There was no social media shaming. It was just a quiet, terrible understanding between a person and their animal that the suffering had become too much. And they trusted me to carry that weight.

We didn't just do it. We held them as they left. We knelt on the cold floor, side-by-side with the owner, and we bore witness.

Now, I hand them a laminated menu of cremation options. "Private" or "Communal." Do you want a "Clay Paw Print" for an extra $75? A "Fur Clipping" in a crystal vial for $120? It feels like upselling grief. People sign a form, hand over a credit card, and ask if they can just "pick up the ashes next week."

I'll never forget a German Shepherd named King. He’d been hit by a tractor. The owner, Mr. Henderson, was a Korean War vet. Tough as leather, hadn't smiled in years. But when I came out of the X-ray room and told him there was nothing to be done, his knees buckled. Right there on my linoleum floor.

He didn't say a word. Just nodded. And then—I’ll never forget this—he knelt down, kissed King’s snout, and whispered, "You were a good soldier, boy. You're relieved of duty."

Then he looked at me, his eyes clear and terrifying, and said, "Do it fast, Doc. Don't let him hurt."

I did.

Later that night, I sat on my porch and drank. I realized this job wasn't just about animals. It was about people. About the love they poured into something that would never, ever live as long as they would.

Now it’s 2025. My hair is white. My hands ache. The clinic is all glass and steel and smells like disinfectant, not hay. We have a 25-year-old "Social Media Manager" who told me I need to film "reaction videos" for TikTok. I told him I’d rather spay myself with a rusty spoon.

We used to fight diseases. Now we fight algorithms and "alternative facts."

A woman came in last week with a bulldog in full respiratory failure. It was choking. I said we needed to intubate and operate, immediately.

She held up her phone. "Hold on," she said, "I’m waiting to hear back from my Facebook group. They said it might just be 'reverse sneezing' and that I should try giving him honey."

I looked at her. I looked at the dog, whose tongue was purple.

"Ma'am," I said, "your dog is dying. He is choking to death, right now. The Facebook group is not in this room."

I nearly quit during the pandemic. That was a special kind of hell. Passing animals through cracked car windows. Yelling diagnoses over the sound of traffic. Putting dogs to sleep on the asphalt of the parking lot because owners weren't allowed inside.

Saying goodbye over a cell phone. Not being able to hug a sobbing, elderly woman who just lost her only companion. It broke something in me. It broke all of us.

But then...

A little girl comes in with a shoebox, crying over a half-dead sparrow she found. Her eyes light up with pure, undiluted hope when I say, "Let's see what we can do."

A trucker with tattoos covering his face breaks down and hugs me because I saved his 15-year-old, one-eyed chihuahua.

An old woman on Social Security, who I know counts every penny, brings me a jar of homemade apple butter because I sat with her for an hour after her cat died, and just... listened.

That’s why I stay.

Because despite the influencers, the credit checks, the online reviews, and the political arguments people have in my waiting room... one thing is still true.

People love their animals with a force that defies all logic.

And when that love is real, it’s the quietest thing in the room. It’s a trembling hand on a matted coat. A whispered "who's a good boy" to a dog that can no longer hear. A wallet emptied without a second thought.

No matter the year, that never changes.

A man shuffled in last month. He looked like he'd been sleeping in his car for a week. He was carrying an old Crown Royal bag. Inside was a kitten, maybe five weeks old. Mangled leg, eyes sealed shut with infection, ribs like a tiny piano.

He put it on the counter. He wouldn't look at me. "I just got out," he mumbled. "I don't have a dollar. I spent my last five on bus fare to get here. But... can you help him?"

I looked at that tiny, broken thing. It let out a meow so small it barely made a sound.

I nodded. "Leave him here. Come back on Friday."

We fixed the leg. We cleaned the eyes. We named him Scrappy.

That man came back on Friday, wearing a clean shirt. He handed me a single, crumpled five-dollar bill. He said, "No one's ever trusted me with anything."

I pushed the bill back into his hand. "Animals don't care about the mistakes you made," I told him. "They only care about the kindness you show. You've shown it. We'll handle the rest. He's your cat."

I have a metal filing cabinet in my office. The bottom drawer is locked. No one touches it.

I take out that drawer. And I remember.

I remember what it was like before the billing software and the one-star Google reviews. Back when we stitched with fishing line and prayer. Back when we held them as they left—and we held their people, too.

If there’s one thing this life has taught me, it’s this:

You don’t get to save them all. You just don't. The biology, the money, the time... you will fail.

But you damn sure better try.

And when the trying is over, and it's time to say goodbye, you have one last, sacred duty.

You stay.

You don't flinch. You don't look at the clock. You don't rush. You kneel on that cold, hard floor, you put your hands on them, and you look them in the eyes as they go. You stay until the last breath leaves their body.

That is the final kindness. That is the part no one trains you for.

It's the part that costs you a piece of your own soul, every single time.

And it's the only part that makes us human.

*Featured Photo by George Becker: https://www.pexels.com/photo/monochrome-photography-of-keys-792031/

Editor's Note: This popped up on my Internet feed one day with no attribution. Let me be the first to say that I didn't write it, but it is wonderfully written. If you know who may have written this, please let me know so they can get the credit they deserve.