Not a Good Neighbor

My youngest son stands in the ruins of his childhood home

You know the jingle, “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.”

As a wildfire survivor who has suffered a total loss of property and pets, who has also been a customer of State Farm’s since I was sixteen, I’m not convinced that’s true.

Let’s play a game. Look around your room. Memorize what you can. Now close your eyes and recall every single thing in that room. Not just the furniture; every book, everything under the furniture, the details of every drawer, every closet, every storage bin. Now do that for every room. Next, imagine all of it, including your trees and your neighborhood, has burned down. Recall every last detail of the place you once knew. This is what insurance requires me to be able to do in order to pay us for the personal property portion of our settlement. We have to recall every single thing we owned, everything we built, everything we lost, while we stand in that ash field, mourning the end of something beautiful. Total loss should just mean a 100% payout, we don’t even have a foundation. We should be healing. But that’s not how State Farm plays. Instead, four months out, we’re cataloguing our lost belongings by searching our foggy brains while waiting to see if they’ll pay us what we need for the structure.

Creating the inventory they require is to re-live the fire over and over until we think we’ve remembered it all. Your insurance…