Shared examples of times we’ve remembered events that, in fact, didn't happen in the way we recalled

At my 50th high school reunion (in 2011), several of us were recalling the suicide of a mutual friend many years before and we each had a distinctly different memory of the circumstances surrounding the event, including when it had happened, differing by years, not months. Later, we were to learn that we’d all been mistaken; but that the common element in every one of our stories was an association of our particular recalled circumstance and date of his death with the last time we had seen him. It seems that each of our brains had constructed a simplified and continuous narrative that led from our last direct contact with him to his death, which in every case was considerably later than we had believed. (We-moirist: Peter)