Earlier this year, I asked my mom to send me the last picture we have of my father. It never occurred to me that I might already have it.
Cameras felt omnipresent when I was young—many parents tend to obsessively document the formative years of their children, and my father also brought a few decades of photography experience to the table. As much as he enjoyed shooting pictures, in my blur of memories, my mom was behind the lens almost as often as him.
After I made my request, my mom dug through the old photo albums, and sent me a pair of pictures she snapped in July of 1988, when the two of them visited San Francisco together. In one, he stands at the bottom of Lombard Street, leaning against a street sign as his camera hangs from his neck. In the other, he’s half-obscured behind a fountain with his camera to his face, lining up a shot at something out of frame.
Five months later, days before he died, I received a point-and-shoot camera for Hanukkah. I imagine my dad had grand plans for teaching me, as his father had taught him, but all I can do is imagine in that regard. I shot a roll of film right away, including a picture of my dad kneeling and holding the present we had gotten him, a ship-in-a-bottle kit. But, I was five at the time, and the resulting picture reveals my lack of skill: The shot is crooked, everything above his nose is cut off, and the right half of the photo is basically all pink floral wallpaper.
On the back of the photo, in blue ink, someone stamped “DEC 1988.”
After my mom texted me the San Francisco photos, I replied with that one, my mind blown. I already possessed what I had been looking for, or at least, as close as I would get to it.
When I packed my car and left my home on March 26, 2009, I set out searching for some sort of truth, hoping that people with more vivid memories than my own would help me understand what I lived through as a child.
It never occurred to me that they might not know the truth, either.
As I drove around the country and spoke with others, I kept catching myself correcting them in conversation—more so with people who knew my father than with others—and as I wrote the narrative that follows, fact-checking proved even more memories faulty. My father’s best friend remembered hearing that my dad wound up on Pan Am 103 after swapping tickets with his assistant, something I’d never heard before, and feel like I would have. My uncle remembers me attending the funeral, when I didn’t. My aunt remembers my father being born on the day before Thanksgiving, but a peek at a 1953 calendar revealed he was born on a Tuesday. Little things, all.
And yet.
In Boston, I had a conversation with a couple that put all of this in perspective, one in which they argued about something I never would have expected, and from the sound of things, not for the first time. After 20 years, I wondered how much anyone remembers accurately at all.
We, as humans, aren’t defined by the events that affect us, we’re defined by how they affect us, by the internal narratives we develop in response to external factors. Studies have shown that every time a person remembers a thing, the act of remembering subtly rewrites that memory in their minds, a personal version of the observer effect. How many times have the people I spoke with thought about these events, these moments that forever reshaped their lives? How many times have I?
How much of the truth remains? Is there any way to know?
One of my favorite books, one that I pretty much shamelessly ripped off in the writing of this, is Chuck Klosterman’s Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story. I’d like to believe this tale contains more than 85% truth, but fear the actual percentage is far less. There’s no way to know.
Regardless of how the events people describe actually played out, I hope this narrative accurately represents the truth of the moments captured within. Ten years later, I’m sure stories have shifted yet again. Maybe he came around. Maybe she conceded that point. Maybe new evidence came to light.
I still think a lot about the events documented here, which means that, inevitably, I misremember parts of it as well. More than that, though, I’ve grown and changed and learned in the intervening near-decade, and that causes problems of its own.
A few weeks ago, while double-checking something in an interview, I stumbled on a clip of myself complaining about a speech given at the 20th anniversary memorial by “the FBI Director or whoever”—a man named Robert Mueller, who I learned earlier this year, led the investigation into the downing of Pan Am 103, and annually attended the memorial. I felt momentarily aghast at what my younger self said, and I can only imagine how many more moments like that would happen if I were to revisit all the tapes.
What follows this foreword is written about events that happened when I was 25, from the perspective of my 25-year-old self. Many of these things I don’t necessarily stand by now, and at least a few make me actively cringe—I recently tweeted the text of my arrival in Ann Arbor with a note calling my younger self a well-meaning dick—but that’s kind of the point. In the years since, I’ve told friends about that encounter, and in the retelling I’ve become more noble every time.
All this story contains is 31 days, shaped by events that happened nearly 7400 days before. That’s plenty of time to forget. That’s plenty of time for memories to distort. That’s nearly the lifetimes of some of the people whose stories are told.
December 21, 1988 changed everything for the people in the tale that follows, but we’ll never know exactly how, because we’ll never know exactly what caused those changes. We experienced the ripples, but we all have different stories of the pebble striking the pond.
Nobody perfectly remembers what happened on the last day of Fall.