But the form-filling ordeal stayed with him. The matter became academic, because Graeber’s mother died before she got Medicaid. If so, how many years of our life do we spend doing paperwork?” “The average American waits six months of her life waiting for the lights to change.
“We spend so much of our time filling in forms,” he says. Steeped in Kafka, Catch-22 and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, Graeber was alive to all the hellish ironies of the situation but that didn’t make it any easier to bear.
Graeber made matters worse by printing his name on the line clearly marked “signature” on one of the forms. So he did, only to be sucked into a vortex of form filling and humiliation familiar to anyone who’s ever been embroiled in bureaucratic procedures.Īt one point, the application was held up because someone at the Department of Motor Vehicles had put down his given name as “Daid” at another, because someone at Verizon had spelled his surname “Grueber”.
Social workers advised him that, in order to pay for the home care she needed, he should apply for Medicaid, the US government health insurance programme for people on low incomes. A few years ago David Graeber’s mother had a series of strokes.
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