Real-Life Stories that Resonate

Why do certain real-life stories haunt us for years, while others are forgotten almost instantly?

Several years ago, a friend of mine gave a party where the guests were asked to bring an object or a photograph and tell a story from their past. I’d just been organizing some old papers, and I brought a series of pictures my dad, a photographer in the South Pacific in WWII, had taken of a funeral in New Guinea. Since I found the photos after my father’s death, I never knew whose funeral it was. He must have meant something to my father, since he kept the photos all those years. But what horrified me about the photos was the background. Row after row of stark, newly dug graves. At the time I first found them, I was grieving over my father’s death. Those pictures made me realize he was one of the lucky ones; he survived and came home to marry his sweetheart and father two children and enjoy a long and rewarding career. Just this weekend, someone who was at that party told me her husband still retells that story. It obviously struck a chord with him.

I remember reading years ago about an American man and his Vietnamese wife who were on the last plane to take off from Saigon when the city fell to the North Vietnamese. The woman had just delivered a child by caesarian, and as they ran to catch the plane, her stitches burst open. But what etched the story in my mind was the fact that the newborn baby, still in intensive care, had to be left behind. The child survived, but it was something like twelve years before her parents were able to see her and bring her to the States. Twenty years later, I still remember reading about it.

I suppose we all have stories like that, little snippets of other people’s lives that affect us so profoundly that they become a part of us. What do you think those stories have in common?