FERS Disability Retirement for Federal Employees: What to Do

It is both a question as well as a concern; a reflection, a statement of loss; a somewhat neutral muddle; like being stuck in quicksand and not quite knowing whether to move or to remain still.  There is a pause right after the words are spoken; an uncertainty, even a feeling of paralysis.  When confronted with a complexity, the query itself may have to be set aside, thought about, reflected upon, pondered for a time.

Often, the best “next step” is to consult with an expert in the field; for, the mere query itself, of openly declaring — and not necessarily with a question mark following — of “What to do” provokes a prefatory consideration that the puzzle was too great to tackle in the first place.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition such that the medical condition prompts the query, “What to do?”, the first step in the process is to consult with an attorney who specializes in Federal Disability Retirement Law.  The OPM Disability Lawyer who specializes in Federal Disability Retirement Law will be able to guide the Federal or Postal employee into the next steps, and the first steps are often the most crucial in the long and arduous journey through the thicket of OPM’s bureaucratic maze.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Federal Disability Retirement Benefits: The mud of life

Do we treat it like the fun of Play-Doh, or of unwanted waste that we screw up our faces in disgust and come crying to wash it off immediately?  What were we like as children – uncaring, carefree, without a mind to the soil that we mix with water and other wet substances about and around the orifices of human cavities; or, with a hint of a smidgeon that lightly touched upon the soles of our shoes, did we come crying to return to an antiseptic precondition of artificiality?

The mud of life is the stuff of movies; we can romanticize it, serialize it into a best-selling paperback novel (skipping over the formality of a hardback in order to sell to the masses), and even turn it into a weekly television series; but in the end, what it means is that we are stuck in a rut at a gas station in the middle of a desolate desert with no money and no prospects.

That is the metaphor of the phrase itself; there is little hope and even a fewer scintilla of a possibility of a potentiality to hope; many times removed, the mud of life is that period that we all hit now and again, where movement forward will never occur, and misery is the fated future forever and a day, beyond the drudgery of an eternity of toil, like the Myth of Sisyphus when the gods condemned him to an existential angst of eternal turmoil.

What can be done about the mud of life?

Like the quicksand in old jungle movies where the thrashing victim is unable to recognize that the greater the exertional motions applied, the sooner the doom of drowning, the best that one can do is to simply plod along, place one foot in front of the other, and somehow manage to get through each day.

Medical conditions tend to do that; they remind us that the mud of life comes more often than we want to realize, and it can be a state of earthly hell without the promise of tomorrow’s paradise.  Enduring it is the best way to get out of it, and then to systematically plan to move beyond.  But what constitutes the “beyond” is the question, for many.  Medical conditions make us realize that there is little point in tomorrow if you can’t even get through today; but even in that moment of being stuck in the mud of life, it is important to plan for tomorrow, if only because it allows you to get through the drudgery of today and seeing beyond to a point of some hope for the future.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suffer from just such a mud of life, where a medical condition is preventing the Postal or Federal worker from performing one or more of the essential elements of his or her position, the way out of the mud of life may be to prepare, formulate and file an effective Federal Disability Retirement application with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset.

Whether you were once a kid who loved playing in the mud, or came crying home because of the dirt of earth’s detritus, as an adult it is time to plan for your future, and preparing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application may be the best first step to move forward and wash away that mud of life’s misgivings.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Federal Employee Disability Retirement: How we treat one another

Separation, distance, objectification and electronic means of communication; the loss of human emotions in the very living of life, where the organic has become equivalent to the android, where the original concept encompassed an admixture of synthetic humanity and the combining of components both human and mechanized – and so the artificial construct that we feared in those novels of sci-fi nightmares has, in fact, been realized.

Orwell’s major work, 1984 is, by comparison, both prescient and outdated.  The underlying concept of a totalitarian state is still relevant, but the technological means by which we have achieved such a state of affairs, and the naïve assumption that we would somehow be informed enough to recognize when we are being “had” by such powerful forces of domination, leaves one breathless with puzzlement.

Existentialism, especially of the French version (i.e., Sartre and Camus, as the two paradigmatic participles – borrowing from the grammatical meaning and translating it into the positional element of influence) argues at the inception from its philosophical origination that language games geared towards objectification and distancing from the humanity of worth, value and normative constraints as defined by the traditions evolving from social contracts, is intended to allow for the justification of the depraved to engage in violent acts of crimes against humanity.

Language allows for cruelty.  How we describe, in what form and manner the grammatical application separates, distances and isolates groups into demeaning and debasing linguistic caricatures that alters the essence of who we are, allows for how we treat one another to result in the horrors of 20th Century camps of torture, totalitarianism and total war.  We can couch language and hide behind it to do as we want.  Power left in the hands of evil, with the meaninglessness of language disseminated among a gullible population left without dictionaries and relying upon the technological information controlled by an elite few, will only progressively decay and deteriorate the foundations of liberty and freedom.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who already experience the consequences of having to submit to linguistic elasticity, meaningless phrases of power and totalitarianism are already in a difficult position when a medical condition begins to impact and prevent the Federal or Postal employee from continuing in the career one has chosen.

Filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, is often a test of sorts that reveals how we treat one another, and it is always better to know at the outset who one’s friends and caring associates are, than to remain in ignorance while the knives are sharpened for the time you turn your back and expect some protections to have watchful eyes while the weakness of debilitating medical conditions continues to progressively deteriorate.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

FERS & CSRS Medical Retirement for Federal Employees: Illness

It is the pause button rendered by the universe, often without warning, without invitation and unwelcomed by all.  Is it the gods laughing in the heavenly seclusion, as wanton children playing with the mortality of souls unrequited, as matches in the hands of mischievous hearts undisciplined by law, life or empathy?

Then comes the triteness of wisdom, yet true but too late: “Oh, what a blessing health is”; “Is there a lesson to be learned?”; “Why me?”.  Is this the crisis of life that is merely an obstacle to overcome, or the long road towards a progressive decline where mortality is not just tested, but revealed as the weak link in the proverbial chain of man-to-gods-to the theology of our own creation?

Illness comes like that unwitting thief in the dead of night, but unlike the burglar who tries to remain silent but for creaking floors and unoiled passageways, it comes without concern for being revealed.  Does the universe test – or remain impervious like Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, where perfection attracts all towards its essence and destroys everything that attempts to escape?  Who determines the criteria of such a test?  What constitutes a “passing grade” as opposed to a failure in its mere attempt?  Is the evaluation contained within the strength of one’s own character, and what results in a declaration of “success” as opposed to the failure of everyday lives?

If it is truly a test of character, then Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers certainly get enough of it to collectively get a passing grade.  Yes, fortunately, there is the option of filing a Federal Disability Retirement application, but for almost all Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers, the reality is that such a step is the last option chosen.

It is not so much that the benefit reaped from a Federal Disability Retirement is so miserly as to not make it worthwhile; no, to a great extent, the annuity of 60% of the average of one’s highest three consecutive years of pay, then 40% every year thereafter until recalculation at age 62 is generous enough to survive upon, especially when the alternative is to remain and kill oneself, resign and walk away with nothing, or file for Federal Disability Retirement benefits; and, in conjunction with the ability to go out into the private sector and be able to make (on top of the Federal Disability Retirement annuity) up to 80% of what one’s former position currently pays – it can lead to an acceptable level of financial security.

Ultimately, however, it is a truism that Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers wait until the final possible moment before making the decision to file a Federal Disability Retirement, often allowing the illness to debilitate beyond the point of reasonable acceptance.  That, in and of itself, is a character test, and one that makes the illness itself of secondary concern, when one’s health should be given the highest priority, lest we allow the gods of wanton carelessness to have the last laugh.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

OPM Disability Retirement for Federal & Postal Employees: Alone

We enter into this impervious universe in such a state.  Yes, yes – there are parents surrounding, love embracing and doctors, nurses and hospital attendants with smiling faces and all of that; but being alone is conceptually distinct from loneliness, and one can be surrounded by a multitude of social acquaintances, family members and close and distant relatives, and still bear the weight of the latter, and yet know throughout that one is nevertheless alone in this world.

One realizes and comprehends that proverbial synergism of that special  “soul-mate” – that special person that the angels sprinkled with the magic of being in a parallel universe of identical comity; or of those special twins who possess an unmatched oneness beyond rational explanation; but, besides such special circumstances and almost mystical exceptions, most of us are alone in this world.

Aloneness goes beyond the human activity of busy-ness; beyond family gatherings and social upheavals of friendships, conflicts, domestic arguments where heartbreaks cutting to the essence of a soul is preferable to sitting in the darkness at the end of the day in a rhythmic rocking chair squeaking away the unscratched surface of a cold marble floor.

We arrive in this world alone; travel through it with companions rarely and barely recognizable; and become decrepit with medical conditions in some unvisited corner of antiseptic-smelling hospital wards where visiting hours are never breached because loneliness knows not the ticking of a clock where blank stares of aged men and women embrace vacantly the timelessness of human frailty.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers whose careers may need to be cut short because of a medical condition, you know well the concept of being alone:  of a Federal Agency that sees you merely as a fungible component that needs to be quickly replaced and filled; of a Postal worker whose decades of allegiance and loyalty are disregarded because of an injury, a debilitating medical condition or a chronic and progressively deteriorating illness.

Preparing, formulating and filing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application will not necessarily abate the sense of being alone, but it will provide a pathway of attempting to reach a plateau in life where the future becomes somewhat more stable, the present becomes clearer and focused with greater definition, and that impervious universe from whence we arrived may somehow provide a heightened sense of worth, and loneliness is disconnected from the reality of being alone.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Federal Disability Retirement: The sweater draped over a chair

You look in the room and see the sweater draped over a chair.  You turn your gaze elsewhere, engage the ongoing conversations and the din of others distracted.  Later, you turn back your gaze again, and the sweater is gone.  You look about to try and see whether someone picked it back up, is wearing it, or perhaps put it somewhere else.

You imply and infer – yes, one must follow the general grammatical rule that the speaker implies while the listener infers; but you are both the speaker and the listener, the one who observes and the same one who steps outside of the conscious universe to observe the observed.  You imply that someone put the sweater over the chair, and that same person (or someone else) took it at a later time – all during a period when your eyes were diverted elsewhere.

You assume that the world continues to operate even outside of the purview of your deliberate and conscious observation, as we all do.  You infer the same; of a world otherwise not within the limited perspective of observation, either by visual or audio awareness.  Yet, where is the evidence of such inference or implication; and that is, of course, what Bishop Berkeley’s restrictive definition of “existence” and Being was meant to encapsulate in perfect form:  Not that there are no mountains on the far side of the moon when we cannot observe them, but that we limit the definition of Being such that peripheral philosophical conundrums created by language’s difficulty with implied Being and inferred Existence can be avoided.

Perhaps we dreamt the draping of the sweater over the chair, or had a fit of phantasm and imaginative discourse that went astray.  In any event, you never saw the person either drape the sweater over the chair, nor dispossess the chair of its warmth and concealment.  Instead, you infer and imply – ignoring the grammatical rules previously mentioned.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who are attempting to prepare an effective Federal Disability Retirement application, to be submitted to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the relevance here concerns writing up an effective narrative of one’s medical condition, its impact upon one’s ability and capacity to perform the essential elements of one’s position, and the legal argumentation to make in order to persuade OPM:  to what extent should facts and other statements be directly delineated, as opposed to leaving certain matters presumed or otherwise to be inferred or implied?

OPM is a bureaucracy, and with all such administrative entities, is made up of varying levels of competence and acuity of observation.  For the most part, in writing up the narrative on SF 3112A, Applicant’s Statement of Disability, the general rule should be to make that which is implicit, as explicit as possible, and never to leave the room where a sweater is draped such that disappearance of the garment may leave a mystery otherwise unable to be solved except by implication and inference.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire