The waiting is the hardest part...

I think one of the worst parts of the long wait for a decision from VA on a claim is the interminable waiting itself.  Not knowing what will come next from the fine minds at VA lends a little bit more uncertainty to each day.  Its cumulative effect is the main source of the frustration I feel every single day.  You might think the occasional letter from VA would lessen that stress, but no, those missives only exacerbate the already tense situation brewing on any given day.  Between bills that have to be paid, mending relationships that don't always weather stress well and the occasional random Tuesday afternoon crisis life has taken on a rhythm that is at once exhausting and unrelenting.
All of  this day after day, week after week, month after month blurs together into years of agonizing misery.  Which could be alleviated at once with a quick and simple response from VA without its multiple volume manuals on how to reply to a veteran's claim if a subsection c paragraph fourteen dot i 3 is met instead of subsection b paragraph twenty six dot u 4.  Perhaps that is a slight exaggeration, but i stress the slight part.  The VA is endlessly writing rules and regulations to administer the various programs Congress has legislated for them to oversee.

Maybe they jut have too much on their rather large and awkwardly managed plate.  It may be that the reason VA behaves with two very different personalities towards the veterans in their care is that the missions they have been charged with have grown to be seen as at odds with each other.  Healthcare and vocational rehabilitation are programs that run counter to the culture of establishing and disbursing monetary, insurance and burial benefits.  The right hand may know what the left is doing but neither approves of the way the other  is doing any of it.
Which brings me back to where I started.  The delays that VA is constantly and accurately blamed for come from the unwieldy bureaucracy that has grown like some noxious weed alongside the congressional intent to help veterans.  Its a by product of the difference between what was meant to happen and what really goes on.  Current VA operations then are an interpretation of an intent that was never clearly conveyed.  Once the error crept into the system, it grew along with the rest of the system.  Along with the normal avarice, mistrust and sloth that plagues any organization, VA has this love hate relationship to contend with.  Veterans are caught in the middle.
And we wait.