Death, Sex & Money25 Okt 2023

Married With No Kids and a Ranching Business with No Heirs

Albert and Sue Sommers met, fell in love and got married in their 40s. Albert is a rancher whose family has worked the same land in Pinedale, Wyoming for over 100 years, and Sue is a writer and multimedia artist who grew up in New Jersey. Since they married later in life and don’t have kids, that raised big questions about what would happen to Albert’s family ranch once they were gone.

Ranching is a tough business, and the Sommers family land is in a part of Wyoming where property values have soared as very wealthy people have moved in. That increases development pressure to turn that land into cash. In 2010, Albert and his family decided on a different, novel path that both preserved the Sommers’ family land from development and enabled them to pass the business to a young neighbor who’s no relation.

Albert and Sue tell Anna about how they got together and took on these big family decisions, and despite their offering differing opinions, how they “continue the conversation.”

Did you know we have a weekly email newsletter for the Death, Sex & Money community? Every Wednesday we send out podcast listening recommendations, fascinating letters from our inbox, and updates from the show. Sign up at deathsexmoney.org/newsletter, and follow the show on

Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Need to set up your Slate Plus feed? If you subscribed through Slate.com, check out our FAQ at slate.com/podcastfaqs for easy instructions. Members subscribed via Apple Podcasts get automatic access—no setup required.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(565)

'Pay-What-You-Want' Defies Logic, Confuses Economists, and Can Really Work

The pay-what-you-want business model is mostly found in museums and churches, but this week we’ll hear from entrepreneurs and artists who are implementing it in unlikely places. Guests include: Katie ...

8 Sep 54min

Behind Closed Tabs: Your Porn Stories

Porn. It’s something that people use in their most intimate, private moments. It’s a way to acknowledge desire — without any of the attachments of intimacy. For some of you, that's incredibly freeing....

1 Sep 30min

'Humane Eldercare Has Become a Luxury Item’

Nursing home care in the U.S. can run families $10,000 a month, a cost Medicare won’t pay for. When Anna de la Cruz's parents both developed dementia around the same time, her family split into two pa...

25 Aug 44min

Passive Aggressive vs. ‘Massive Aggressive’ With Novelist Elizabeth Strout

The bestselling novelist behind works like Amy and Isabelle and Olive Kitteridge discusses her excitement about turning 70, her reserved New England upbringing, and how death figures into her latest n...

18 Aug 47min

A Refreshingly Curious Adventure through Our Divided America

Peter Santenello has been documenting his world travels on YouTube for nearly two decades, but it wasn’t until he moved in with a family in the Ukrainian countryside that he really began to hone his s...

11 Aug 55min

I Have a Crush on My Therapist. Now What?

Caroline started going to therapy as a teenager because of depression. After a couple of years working together, she expressed a fantasy. “I had a vision of us dancing to Pachelbel's Canon” she told h...

4 Aug 55min

How a Very Polite Danny McBride Creates Characters That Go Berserk

The man behind artful and goofy comedies like The Righteous Gemstones and Eastbound and Down talks about finding his people at an upstart public film program in North Carolina, crafting characters tha...

28 Jul 57min

The Sexy Soundtrack for the ‘New Black Middle Class’

In the mid-1970’s, a small college radio station created an evening program catering to a new socioeconomic group referred to as the “new Black middle class.” The show was called “The Quiet Storm” and...

21 Jul 56min