FERS Disability: no minimum age requirement for fers medical-based pension annuities

OPM Disability Retirement under FERS: Treading Life

October 25, 2019

We don’t often think of it in those terms; but, in fact, that is how most of us live. Like the meek swimmer who does not want to drown, we merely tread water — sometimes calmly, often with a sense of desperation; and too often, with a fear that results in a frenzied struggle. We invent euphemisms for that: Keeping out “heads above water”; Not drowning; “Sink or swim”; “Like being on the Titanic”; and other similar statements emanating from water-based fears. […]

FERS Disability Retirement for Federal & Postal Employees: Seeking

October 22, 2019

Isn’t that the condition for life? That we continually engage in the very human act of seeking, whether for personal growth or professional aptitude; but it is always that constant need to know, to expand, to cross borders and extend beyond the invisible ceiling or barrier that is placed from our birthright to explore and to seek. […]

FERS Disability Retirement: Night wanderings

January 21, 2019

Ever open your eyes in the middle of the night and, instead of falling quickly back to sleep, allow for the eyes to wander across the silent room where others are still and asleep — the dog on the floor (or perhaps curled at the foot of the bed where human warmth has gathered for the pure comfort serving the creature) and the partner beside; the quiet glow of the digital numbers in bold red reflection; the pictures on the walls — though you “know” what they depict, […]

Federal & Postal Disability Retirement: Something happened

May 12, 2018

Beyond a mundane declaration of befuddlement, it is also the title of a novel by Joseph Heller — his second novel published some 13 years after the successful first one that most people remember him by: Catch-22. It lacks the surrealism of the first novel; the absurdity of tragic events unfolding distinguishable from the logical and sequential manner in which we see the world, […]

Federal & Postal Disability Retirement from OPM: The restorative morning

April 16, 2018

That is the purpose of sleep, is it not? Or so we anthropomorphically attribute. Is that the only reason for the somnolence that overwhelms, the snore that momentarily suspends in the air and pauses for people to smile, to be horrified or laugh because of the incongruence of the sound that shatters the quietude of twilight? Do humans sleep more soundly than other species? […]

Federal Disability Retirement Representation: Hope springs

December 14, 2017

“Eternal”, of course, is the ending and attachment that most would declare if asked to fill in the blank. How many of us know of the origin of the statement, what it means, from whence it comes (yes, yes, a Google search is only one finger button away)? It is often an afterthought – a “throw-away” line that one scatters about in response to someone else’s statement about “hoping to do X” or having “hope that X will happen”. […]

Federal Employee Disability Retirement Benefits: Writing a life

August 3, 2016

It is lived; or so we attempt to do so. This thing called “life”; neither an art form, and forever unaccompanied by instructions or even a cheap compass; most are abandoned at the junkyards of forgotten corners, where the trifecta of raw sewage, mistreatment of body and spirit, and the crass exposure to the detritus of human discontent coalesce to present the irony of birth preceding an inevitable death. Heidegger taught that we engage in projects in order to avoid the ultimate outcome; for Nietsche, nihilism opened doors for optimism […]

Medical Separation a nd Retirement under FERS or CSRS: The nose beyond which

April 25, 2016

The human animal has reached a point of evolutionary pedigree where constant vigilance with the outside world is generally thought to be unnecessary; although, still when an individual walks through an unlit parking lot in the dead of night, the hairs which straighten and stand at attention on the nape of one’s neck would belie such an expression of civility amongst the savagery of newsworthy crimes printed daily. Most of us live and walk about completely immersed within our own thoughts and reflections; and when encounters with the “outside” world suddenly jolt into an awareness just beyond, to focus upon the individual, event or incident which indicated a need for such engagement, […]

OPM Disability Retirement: A Day Does Not a Life Make, Nor a Decade

January 29, 2015

The tragedy of extinguishment is the failure to recognize future potentiality. We often gauge the value of a lifetime based upon the quality of any given day. Yet, what happens in an arbitrary period of a life, whether viewed randomly on a day, or even assessed and evaluated over a decade, will rarely reflect the comparative worth of a lifetime as analyzed on a linear continuum. Youth is a wasted period of emergence; […]