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OPM Disability Retirement Benefits: The legacy

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It is something that we leave behind.  Yet, unlike a wallet, a watch, a piece of jewelry or a troublesome child better left forgotten, we don’t have an opportunity to go back and get it.  We say of that laundry list, “Oh, I need to go back and get it” (except maybe of the last in the list, whom we hope will be adopted into a kindly family and simultaneously also leave the parents behind); but not of the legacy.  No one ever says of that, “Oh, I left my legacy behind, and I need to go back and get it.”  Instead, it is intimately bound up with mortality, […] Read More …

OPM Disability Retirement: Another Test

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Peel an orange, and you have the fruit; skin a nut, and the unmasked food is revealed; but how does one get to the essence of a person? Schools do it repetitively; job interviews count on it; security clearances rely upon it. Life is one set of tests after another; and whether through formalized questions designed to reveal the extent of rote knowledge, or of more subtle encounters to discover one’s character, the attempt to unravel the essence of an individual comes in many forms, in multitudinous appearances, and in engagements which never fully define the person tested. […] Read More …

Federal Disability Retirement: Delaying the Inevitable

Posted onAuthorFederal Disability Retirement Attorney1 Comment

Projection of future events, anticipation of coming circumstances, and rumination upon conflicts yet to occur; these are very human experiences beyond mere base anxieties. Other primates may recognize and prepare to react to events about to develop, but the wide spectrum of time between the current state of affairs, and the projected future event, is perhaps the most telling factor in differentiating the complexity of human beings from other animals. […] Read More …

OPM Disability Retirement: Stages

Posted onAuthorFederal Disability Retirement Attorney1 Comment

Life brings about natural “stages” — paralleling certain age requirements, with subsets and parenthetical footnotes as to each. As the queried riddle posed by the Sphinx (“What has four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, three legs in the evening, and no legs at night?”) brings about clarity of identity, so the stages of life provide a glimpse into the inherent complexity of man’s psyche. […] Read More …