Medical Retirement for Federal Workers: Wotan’s Spear

It is the spear engraved with runic laws, captured in Wagner’s opera cycle, and Norse legend has it that it never misses its mark regardless of the ability of the wielder.

In health, that is how many feel, and come to believe.  In ill-health, or declining and deteriorating health, one’s mortality, susceptibility, and vulnerability come into question; and all of those walls of invincibility begin to crumble.  Suddenly, Wotan’s spear is held with wobbly hands; the grip is unsure, and the mark is unclear.  Present circumstances become a muddle of uncertainty, with past accolades unaccounted for or of little to no significance; and the future is not the bright star guiding one’s course of current actions.

Lebenswelt constitutes the totality of subjective-to-world experiences in phenomenology; when a medical condition engulfs one, the sensitivities to all of life’s experiences comes to the fore, such that the desire for life’s fulfillment and all that it offers becomes exponentially magnified in relevance, importance, and significance. For the Federal and Postal employee who begins to suffer from a medical condition, such that the medical condition begins to impact one’s ability to perform the essential elements of one’s job, the capacity to survive economically, financially, and physically, as well as maintaining a semblance of cognitive and mental normalcy, takes on a fresh urgency.

Filing for Federal & Postal Disability benefits through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether under FERS or CSRS, is a pragmatic step which must be taken in order to attain a level of security and peace, and to attend to one’s health.  Health is the hallmark of who we are and how we are destined to live.  While filing for a benefit may seem like a mundane event when turmoil abounds, for the Federal and Postal employee who must continue to contend with the daily toils of life, the ability to throw Wotan’s spear and accurately hit the bullseye is still a needed goal despite one’s loss of stature in the Federal sector.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

 

Federal and Postal Disability Retirement: Waiting for the Perfect Storm

Calamities can be admired, if from a distance; and the labeling of a natural event as the “perfect storm” reveals a conceptual sense of awe for that which is at once destructive, but simultaneously of sufficient power as to demand respect. It has come to mean the coalescence of elements and circumstances which, each in their individually separate characteristic, may result in a force of some sufficiency, but in the collective combination, enhances an exponential magnitude well beyond the capability of potency generally imagined.

Such occurrences are rare, and the statistical chances of attaining such perfection of disparate elements to be coordinated in time, space and defying potential variances, results in the rare aberration of such events. To wait upon such an historical event is to defy the odds; to expect to witness one in one’s lifetime is to disregard the astronomical statistical anomalies.

Such rarity of events, however, are just as often ignored in other arenas of life, though perhaps of lesser impact upon the world at large, including personal calamities involving the introduction of a medical condition which impacts one’s life. Federal and Postal Workers who are beset with a medical condition such that the injury, disability or progressively deteriorating condition may prevent one from performing one or more of the essential elements of one’s positional duties for the Federal government or the U.S. Postal Service, will often engage in procrastination in filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, by waiting upon the coalescence of all elements to a point of perfection — of waiting, in essence, upon the occurrence of the perfect storm.

Such delay is merely an excuse to fail to act, precisely because the coordinated combination will almost always have some elements missing. In responding to a crisis, there is rarely a right time; instead, the very definition of a crisis involves the rarity of the event, guided by the timeliness of an action in order to avoid the beauty and destructive force of that perfect storm.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire