OPM Disability Retirement: Ends and Beginnings

One can be pensive or mournful about it; anxiety levels likely attach to either event; one is described and defined as the conclusion and afterthought, the other, as a preface or introduction.  The end of an event necessarily results in change, as does the beginning; and perhaps it is merely a circularity of unending infinity, or a linear continuum which extends beyond the horizon of concavity.

It is merely in our own minds where bifurcations occur; our Kantian imposition of space, time and categories dividing the noumenal world into sectional differentiations and groupings which we, in our subjective states of perceptual uniqueness, view and encounter the world “out there”.  Thus do beginnings and ends, ends and beginnings, impact our lives, and the angst and anxieties which accompany such forebodings of timelessness.

For the Federal employee or the U.S. Postal worker, the end of a career marks the beginning of a life change which only his or her self, family members, and close friends know about, care for, and somewhat understand on the periphery of emotional turmoils, as to the trauma such a change in circumstances can incur.

While Federal Disability Retirement benefits, wrought through proving one’s case with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, may allay some of the concerns regarding benefits, health insurance, a base annuity and income, etc., it cannot make up for the lifetime of striving and building which occurred in the private mind and public life of the U.S. Postal Worker and Federal employee.

Federal Disability Retirement represents an end, in some ways, to a career of one’s building, but also a beginning; a start for attempting to achieve that level of functionality which a medical condition robbed and thwarted; an intermediate period in which to recover, regroup, and plan for the future beyond the federal sector.

Federal Disability Retirement is a benefit accorded to all Federal and Postal employees who have met minimum service requirements, and allows for the Federal and Postal employee to receive a base annuity, and at the same time, to begin to build a life beyond Federal Service.  It can be a last chapter, or the first chapter, in the narrative life of the Federal employee or U.S. Postal Worker; that determination is yet to be revealed, and will only be known in the faded etchings left upon tombstones memorializing the life, accomplishments and loving relationships of those who murmur silent whisperings in the grassy knolls of time.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire