fers disability retirement handbook

Disability Retirement for Federal Government Employees: Admitting defeat

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It is probably the single most difficult thing to do in life, and its inability reflects upon the abysmal state of education, both higher and lower.  The manner in which education is perpetuated – where “right answers” receive accolades and admitting of defeat merely alters the pecking order of who is admired and who are relegated to the detritus of human society – merely reinforces the greater loss of empathy, the destruction of civility and the coarsening of society. […] Read More …

OPM Disability Retirement: In the “not working” world

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Excellence is rarely seen; the artisan is dead to the world; and we all struggle through knowing that trinkets from foreign countries symbolize the incompetence of the universe in which we must continue to exist.  Something is not working.  We all know it, feel it, worry about it and whisper in circles where such things are concealed and rarely revealed. […] Read More …

OPM Disability Retirement Benefits: The picture album

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Time was, every family had a picture album – that anachronism bound carefully in a large leather book-shaped monstrosity, kept safe where dust settles and mice scurry around; taken out for occasions where boredom is accentuated and friends or neighbors have stayed long past their welcome, and so it is taken out carefully, dusted off and laboriously paged through, telling of a history for each page, each photograph laid meticulously upon the thick plaster-backboard of a person’s history. […] Read More …

Attorney Representation Federal Disability Retirement: Quiet

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Is “quiet” the same as silence?  Or, of lack of noise?  Is it a state of mind-body consonance, where the body can remain calm and unmoving, yet the mind remains racing with thoughts, and in that state of being, do we fool ourselves to think that the outer world will not impact the inner mind?  Or, in reverse order?  Quiet is that which we strive for, in a world where din is the normalcy of life. […] Read More …

Federal Disability Retirement: Keeping it together

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Living in modernity is a complex juggling act that never ends.  Simplicity recollected in former times often harken towards an idealization that perhaps never existed, where toil, labor and survival were a coalescence of a person’s life, and meaning was never divorced from what one was engaged in, the acts of striving, the struggle to earn a living.  Modernity magnifies Marx’s observation that human discontent is a result of separating man’s labor from the self-esteem of accomplishment, where the factory worker sees merely a microcosm of monotony […] Read More …

Attorney Representation Federal Disability Retirement: Unremembered

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It is a strange concept that encompasses a sequence of duality in the willfulness of the mind – first, to recall, to bring out from the cognitive closet of one’s mind, a vestige of that which was once lost.  Then, the act of the “un” – a negation which abandons that which was once rediscovered; to cast aside and set away an image, a piece of knowledge or a conceptual relic once recovered but now, with deliberative intent, to throw it back into that back room collection where things reviewed have been considered but found to be unworthy to keep in open exhibition. […] Read More …

Medical Retirement for Federal Employees: A breach of instinct

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What if?  that fragile balance that exists in nature, seen when squirrels scrounge about in search of roots and nuts, moving within the tranquil space besides cardinals, woodpeckers, rabbits and robins abounding when, suddenly, birds attack the rabbits and squirrels, and in turn, the rabbits and squirrels chase one another and attempt to catch and devour the birds, and the mayhem that follows goes on for an unceasing eternity. […] Read More …

OPM Medical Retirement under FERS & CSRS: Admission

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It is a noun of peculiar variability, perhaps all interconnected upon reflection.  It can refer to the permission to enter, whether by right, payment or removal of obstacles; or, denoting the price of such entrance; or even yet, a confession or acknowledgment of a point taken; and in other contexts, of being accepted into a fraternity of sorts, as in “admission to a university” or “to the legal bar” – meaning, not an actual, physical movement through gates now open, but a conceptual membership into a community of selective individuals. […] Read More …

Federal & Postal Disability Retirement: Comfort in regularity

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We thrive and relish in it, despite our protestations to the contrary; and while most of us utter monologues denouncing the boredom of imposed seclusion, and for fleeting moments envy the adventurer, the person constantly living “on the edge”, and that proverbial black sheep who seems to wander from aimless job to dead-end ones, the majority of the population […] Read More …