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
June 23, 2026 at 9:21 am |
I would probably have gotten to Kafka and Dostoevsky on my own eventually, but I got to them in Modern European Literature at Princeton, a survey course (the alternatives were, I think, American Literature and Shakespeare, but I’d already done both of those, so I went for genuinely new stuff; all freshmen had to do one of them). It was punishingly hard work, something like 20 books that semester, and 3 papers to write, and timed written exams, and I had an egregious asshole for a section man (story to follow), but it was in fact absolutely fabulous, a piece of the celebrated liberal education I had hoped to get from Princeton, and the content stuck with me.
Now the story. My first paper was on symbolism in Mann’s Death in Venice (yes, I know, fish in a barrel), I was pleased with it, but distressed when I got something like a 2- on it (there were 17 possible grades, from 1+, 1, and 1- through 5-, plus 6 and 7, both failing); I thought I deserved at least a 1-, so went to the section man for an explanation. Oh, he said airily, yes, that was definitely a 1+ paper, probably the best paper I’ve ever seen, but you can’t give a 1+ to a first-term freshman, they’d have nothing to motivate them to work harder. I gave him the back of my tongue and a raging lecture on academic morality and said that if he didn’t start grading for actual value I’d have him up before the Faculty Council (I wasn’t at all sure I could do that, but I was a newspaperman already, outside of Princeton, and understood the power of a great public stink.) He took my point. After that, I got 1s and 1+s, deservedly, on everything. Much later, I showed my Dylan Thomas paper for that course to Roman Jakobson, and he wanted to have it published, but I was overloaded with other work at the time and couldn’t take it on.
June 23, 2026 at 3:41 pm |
I’m sorry to hear about this sorry mess. But I have a lot of faith in Elizabeth; don’t give up.
June 23, 2026 at 4:25 pm |
I was reading about cases in which the physical card is required, and I am fully reassured that their wanting it has nothing at all to do with trying to exclude you and rather to do with Medicare and Social Security and stuff like that. Here’s something from an assisted living places’ website: “While some facilities may accept a photocopy or just the number alongside a government-issued photo ID, most senior living communities ask for the physical card. This is used to verify the resident’s identity, confirm state or federal benefits (like Medicaid, Medicare, or VA benefits), and complete financial billing agreements.” (I also posted this on your FB page — sorry for duplication.) So while it certainly sounds like an annoying hassle, it isn’t intended as an insult or an intention to exclude you — they must ask everyone.
June 25, 2026 at 5:28 pm |
I wish this weren’t happening to you. I have no advice, and this may be of little comfort to you, but I think of you almost daily and of your grit and grace facing your body’s betrayals. And now the humiliations of bureaucracy! Fuck ‘em, I say!
June 25, 2026 at 7:08 pm |
I will write up the experience, which turned out to be quite different in tone from the summoning document, and I taxed them on that point before launching into a performance that was critical in bits, mostly a fabulous display, full of extravagant (though merited) boasting — something I almost never do, but I was showing them they were getting a world-class character of a sort they had never seen before. Some of it was genuinely funny, and several parts were impressively educational for the audience.
Every so often I introduced one of my many professional ventures and roles (oh yes, I’m cognitive psychologist, and I have a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Princeton, and yes, I’ve been a newspaperman). At one point, Sharon Gray from my geriatric care agency broke in to tell them I’hd been a concert pianist, and I added my 12 years as a dementia caregiver. And so on. It’s all true, but as an assemblage it’s just *so* fucking unbelievable.
Two things. One, the assembled staff turned out to be very nice, interesting people. Two, there actually was a period of testing, mostly to judge my cognitive abilities. Oh, I said, you’re going to ask me to count backwards from 100 by 7s (this is where I admitted to being a cognitive psychologist), whereupon the somewhat startled convener of the meeting asked me to count backwards from 100 by 7s. At which point I asked them if any of them knew there was a trick to doing that, and they didn’t, so I explained the trick, which is a combination of a simple mathematical equivalence (X – 7) = (X – 10) + 3 (here came the Princeton math degree) and the fact that in a decimal system for numbers, subtraction of 10 and addition of 3 are hugely easier (impose a much smaller cognitive load) than subtraction of 7 (here came the cognitive psychology) I then reeled out the numbers, faster than they’d ever seen anyone do them. Adding in conclusion that as they could see, I am a compulsive teacher. I will use my tastes in food, sex, music, garden plants, any goddam thing, to teach something. And I will enjoy that immensely.
This seems to suit them. And they do not in fact need my SS card.
Be happy for me.
June 26, 2026 at 7:27 am
I am indeed happy to read this, and I suspected, along with Ellen Kaisse, that the situation was not as dire as you initially supposed.