FERS & CSRS Disability Retirement from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management: Crisis Points of Urgency

Additional responsibilities unexpectedly piled on tend to magnify it; life’s inevitable bumps often reveal it; mere negative news may even confirm it; and medical conditions certainly quantify it.  The “it” referenced by each subject signifies the crisis point and juncture of necessity; and the underlying substratum which forms the common element throughout, is the medical condition which impacts upon a person’s life.

Thus, for most healthy individuals, the daily stresses of life, the unexpected flat tire, the transmission blown which costs beyond what was budgeted for; a foolhardy act by one’s child, resulting in a legal process; even a project gone badly at work, where blame is ascribed to an unfair and unjustifiable degree — all can be tolerated by the manifold capacity of the human spectrum of dealing with life’s turmoils; but add the ingredient of a medical condition, where the physical and psychological stamina of will and stability are tested and stretched beyond one’s limits, and suddenly a crisis develops.

Further, holidays tend to exponentially exacerbate and take things out of proper balance and perspective. For Postal and Federal employees who are under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, the sudden need to file for Federal Disability Retirement benefits, especially during a time of added stresses and untold and private points of crisis, is often real and the compelling circumstances of immediate urgency. But it is always the long-term view which must be maintained, despite the desire to give in to a sense of existential doom of an immediate collapse, where time, space and cognitive dimensions suddenly stampede into that flashpoint of unsettled coalescence.

OPM Disability Retirement for the Federal or Postal worker should always be planned, and seen as the way towards a brighter future. For, while the present circumstances of one’s life may seem like the collapse of a lifetime, it is the sense of future boding, of a plateau of quietude as one approaches a lonely path in the dawn of one’s life, which should be taken in order to secure that hope for tomorrow.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire