last letter from tobias

h?
The Hauser Institute
Researching forgetfulness, recollection and identity loss

May 20th 2008


My dear friends,

How is it cracking?

To be honest, and I want to be honest with you, things have not been cracking here very well at all. In fact I believe I may be cracking up. Squawk squawk!
Anyway where to begin...

Well-thank you. Thank you for your extraordinary support. It has been a very strange, sad time for me these last few weeks and I....well your stories have been more important than you can possibly imagine.

Last Friday when we skyped each other I realised that the game was up. In fact I realised that it had all been a strange, comforting but dangerous game. Re reading your questions to me and Beny I decided that I must tell you everything.

Twelve years ago this April just gone, when you were just coming into the world, someone very important to me was taken away. My wife. My pregnant wife.

She was a brilliant archeologist and we had shared a life together in Birmingham not far from where you are sitting now reading this message. Anyway, and this has been so hard to write about in the last week or so with events in China and Burma being what they are: She died on a trip to Ecuador twelve years ago. She died and with her, it seemed, so did my future.

For years I wondered how I could forget about what might have been. Then I began to dream of the boy who might have lived, who he might have been, what he would have been like. The more I dreamed, the more real he became.

Reading your wonderful messages teeming with ideas, jokes and enthusiasm I realised that the memory of the boy who could never be was becoming too painful. I have watched the pictures of the earthquakes day and night and seen how this pain is is shared by thousands of others.


I can see now what his life would have been like, what his friends might have been like and how he might have sounded. In some ways he seems more real to me now thanks to you...

I hope you will forgive me and that we will still meet some time so that I can thank you and hear how I can say goodbye to the boy forever.

thanks again



Tobias