From Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky (my daughter) on 6/20, completely out of the blue:
Re: Assessment Thursday 10:30: The assessment visit is at the Avant [“a WellQuest Living Community”, offering independent living for seniors in Palo Alto]. All their departments meet you to make sure you’re a fit. I think it takes about an hour. Somebody will take you.
The summons. I am Josef K, summoned to appear before the Agency, unnamed and unidentified judges who will oversee my case. The Agency requires that I supply them with a packet of evidence, print-outs of responses to a long series of questions. A team of three people (my daughter Elizabeth, my grandchild Opal, and Opal’s partner Emy) spend hours assembling this material for me.
Despite the Social Security Administration’s repeated assertions that original copies of SS cards are almost never required for any purpose, the Agency insists that we must supply an original, just because that’s what they require (apparently, if they required, however whimsically, that I have my SS number tattooed on my ass, I would have to do that). It then turns out that obtaining a replacement copy of an SS card is (at least at the moment) virtually impossible, requiring that I somehow prove that I am the person I say I am and also somehow prove that my phone number is what it is, though they do not accept it (welcome to Dystopia).
Denial of service. Now this insistence on supplying reams of hard-to-obtain evidence to some shadowy administrative entity is a familiar tactic used by bodies intent on denying services; it’s a refusal scheme. I am offended and insulted by this treatment from Avant; apparently, they will keep upping the ante until I fail at something (in this case, getting an original SS card). Perhaps they see that I am not in fact the sort of person they want in their community (I have been spectacularly rejected, throughout my life, this would be one more painful episode), or maybe they have someone who would pay even more than I would, or maybe they just don’t know how to communicate welcome (I had been under the impression that I was the sort of person they actually wanted at Avant, so that their apparent shift to denial of service was especially hurtful).
I am undone. It really doesn’t matter, because they have sent me into a downward spiral; I have in fact unraveled, I cannot cope, have been unable to eat, and caught only 5 hours of extremely tortured sleep last night. I want to be transported somewhere else, or to lapse into dormancy, curled up in a ball, but in any case away from this pain.
I will go to appear before the Agency (I would say to face the Grand Inquisitor, but I am in no way Christ-like), if only to try to determine why they are doing this to me. It was such a wonderful possibility, now being snatched from me. I was, briefly, deliriously happy. I even have a considerable history of companionable communal living (before I was disabled and disfigured by necrotizing fasciitis and then further disabled by kidney disease).
And now you will tell me that I am being too sensitive, that that’s the reason I’m a failure. That my unacceptability is even deeper than I’d imagined. No doubt the Agency will explain this to me on Thursday.
June 23, 2026 at 7:48 am |
Josef K.: from Kafka’s Der Process
“The Grand Inquisitor”: a story within Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1880 novel The Brothers Karamazov