Truth

I reject your reality and substitute my own. - Adam Savage

Ed, my dad’s law partner, was a gentle, soft-spoken man with a quick wit and a great sense of humor. I knew him mostly from often being at my dad’s office after school, as well as family picnics. The two were good friends in addition to being law partners. Through different stages of my life, Ed always took the time to ask how things were going, and seemed genuinely interested in my answers.

After college, I wasn’t home much anymore. I hadn’t seen him for several years, but we’d all gathered for a funeral and Ed was there. He was in the final stages of Alzheimer's disease. He didn’t recognize anyone around him, including his wife, my dad, and me. It was devastating and shocking. All of his reference points and his relationships were gone. Everything that had defined him and given his life meaning was stripped away. He didn’t know what was true or false anymore.

Have you ever played this memory game? You’re told a story by someone whispering in your ear, or you read it on an index card. You in turn whisper it to the person next to you, and it’s passed down the line to the final person. It works best with eight or ten people. The last person then tells the story out loud, and inevitably, some of the details have changed. The colors are wrong, or the time and place have been altered. What was said and by whom has changed too, sometimes to reflect an entire different meaning than the original. Everyone has a good laugh. It’s just a game.

Since the truth is an absolute concept, we tend to make it very black or white. Someone’s telling a complete lie, or they’re telling the complete truth. When someone is being sworn in for testimony in a court of law, they’re asked to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Lying to law enforcement officers is a crime, and withholding the truth can be obstruction of justice. But truth is on a pedestal all its own. We have a certain morbid respect for murderers or other heinous criminals when they come clean - at least they told the truth. We think that somehow just knowing the whole truth, no matter how crushing or salacious, will right the ship and set the universe in order again.

People exaggerate, misrepresent, manipulate and outright lie to advance their ideologies or their agendas, but there are those individuals who want to be honest, who have no intention of deceiving anyone. The problem is that there is a cold, grinding, dispassionate, indiscriminate truth, and there is our truth. Here’s the difference between the two.

Our truth is what we can remember. If the memory isn’t there, neither is our truth.

As long as we are willing to accept our memory as truth, the absolute truth will probably never be known, nor do we really want it to be. That truth is buried like a bone in the backyard. Let it stay there.