Takeshi Lee

About

The call usually comes after a bureaucratic humiliation. A bank that will not accept the death certificate, a form addressed to someone who is gone, an automated letter arriving on a birthday. It is rarely the large moments that finally tip someone into asking for help. Those small indignities accumulate. A widow may hold together through the funeral and the first Christmas and then find themselves undone by a phone menu that has no option for their situation. We take that seriously rather than treating it as a trivial trigger. The administrative cruelty of death is real and almost nobody acknowledges it out loud. I have spent a long time in this work and the paperwork stories still make me angry on people's behalf. That has not worn off. If a form finally undid you, that is a perfectly good reason to be here.