Memorial Day: When my grandmother committed suicide in 1931, my uncle Teddy (Nathaniel Theodore Koeppel) was only five years old, the eighth of nine children. He begged my father to take him along to Des Moines, where my father was going, but Johnny was only 16, was uneducated and had to make a life for himself, so he left Teddy behind. After a troubled boyhood, Teddy joined the Air Force, but he was unhappy and directionless. Eventually, the F.B.I. showed up at my parents house in Rochester, N.Y., and said that Teddy was A.W.O.L. A few years later, they learned that he had killed himself. My Uncle Freddy (Frederick Ferdinand Koeppel, b. 1910 and the oldest child in the family), was grievously wounded at the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. He walked with crutches the rest of his short life. I only saw him once, when he came to visit us in Rochester, and he felt to me like a strange and inexplicable presence. My father compiled a genealogy of the Koeppel/Schmidt/Carrington families in the 1990s, and in a psychological gesture that to me speaks of the depths of his guilt and grief, he omitted the death dates for his brothers Teddy and Freddy.
Posted on: Mon, 26 May 2014 14:19:01 +0000
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