Truth is stranger than fiction

For the past four years I was chasing memories.

 

Through family stories, faded pictures and old documents, I was obsessively trying to reconstruct the indisputable truth.

 

Many of these memories once I got hold of them turned out to be completely false. Like colorful soap bubbles they exploded once I touched them, leaving nothing but air. I had to smile when I came across a filmed video of my mother, at age seventy, saying looking straight at the camera, how her grandmother died when she was three years old. I know this is not true; I am holding in my hands the document with the exact date of her death. I know now, contrary to what I held true for years, that I was named after my grandmother’s sister who died in Europe during the war. I also know that my name ran in the family going back to my great, great grandmother.

 

A strange mixture of facts and fantasy memories seem to acquire, over the years, an independent existence of their own, at times separated from the mere truth. I am at peace now with this dichotomy.

 

There is the factual truth and by its side the memory and both can hold their ground, and both have the right to exist.