When I first learned about my great uncle, Abe Feller, he had been dead by suicide for many years, his story bronzed into family myth. It was recited more than told, chanted with the rhythm of prayer: editor of the Harvard Law Review; youngest attorney to argue before the World Court; Harvard Law professor; member of President Franklin Roosevelt's "brain trust;" co-author of the United Nations charter, and its first General Counsel. And all the while, he performed feats of intellectual derring-do that had become family legend, such as reading The Encyclopedia Britannica cover-to-cover and learning Italian in a week.
This story contains depictions of and discussions of suicide. If you are in crisis, please call the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.
Still, Abe has never felt like an integral part of our family's larger story. He's a bright tangent, a rocket that explodes in mid-flight and stops conversations. Whenever his name came up, a cousin would murmur, "Roy Cohn—it was Cohn who destroyed his life. Simple as that." But then, nothing. Not even the wistful trailing-off typically inspired by absent friends or uncles.
In my family's mythology, the Abe Feller who plunged to his death during the Red Scare is embodied in equal measure as the exemplary and the damaged, the inspirational and the cautionary. I often asked my grandparents about him. But they would recite the legend and change the subject at the mention of his irradiated name.
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