“You’ve got this all wrong. It was cold,” My brother Bob insisted. “The fiercest cold I’ve ever felt.” He pulled his arms in close to his sides and visibly shuddered even though we were standing in a hot, New England kitchen in July, 2014.

He had just read a section of my memoir about my husband’s death in Vietnam in 1969. Bob is two years older than me so I couldn’t attribute his faulty memory to our relative youth back then. I was twenty-two and Bob, twenty-four, when my husband was killed. We were adults. So, why, almost fifty years later, did he recall a broiling hot day in spring as frigid?

I tried a rational approach: “The funeral was on May 29th. It was almost 100 degrees that day. Don’t you remember – Uncle Ephraim had a heat stroke in the middle of it?”

My brother and I are emotionally close in spite of the fact that he is 180 degrees different from me in his political views. We can argue with hammer and tongs about taxes and politics but we’ve never disagreed vehemently about the weather. It felt eerie to be debating something I’d written that was so irrelevant to the event itself. But he continued to insist; it was cold, freezing cold, that day.

This dispute with him about air temperature on one of the most terrible days of my life stayed with me after my book was published and went out into the world. I wondered, briefly, what other details readers/critics might challenge and whether I should worry.

I resolved that it didn’t matter if my brother thought it was cold; that this was his emotional memory of that day and it was okay for him to remember it like that. The fact that my factual description had elicited such a strong reaction – of how he remembers his grief – began to feel like a compliment rather than a conflict. It also offered a concrete example of how fickle and impressionable our memories can be when charged by a highly emotional event. It illustrates that we can have concentric emotions, arcs of other shapes which share the same center of the core experience. All great fodder for reflection in our writing journey as we try to understand our emotional memories.