In memories, the details may be all that matter| MARK HUGHES COBB

To start with, it's Mandela Effect, as in people falsely believing Nelson, the anti-apartheid leader, died imprisoned in the 1980s. Not Mandala Effect, in which spiraling concentric patterns stimulate that part of your mind first tickled by experiments in altered reality, aka "Oh wow," or the Double Rainbow "What does it meeeean?"

I just call it People Be Stupid, given it's easier than ever to check the veracity of things, on palm-sized machines bearing enough computing power to send folks to the moon. Pretty sure my thesis is solid, given daily evidence on social media. As Michelle Wolf said, "You know, in high school if you didn't believe in science it was just called failing."

Maybe it's due to this job, in which we're strict about not saying things wrong, or saying wrong things, then if we do, correcting them as soon as possible, but even tiny false memories stick in my craw. For example, in an otherwise fine novel I was reading recently, a narrator speaks about his family gathering to watch Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon ... on the afternoon of July 20, 1969.

One small misstep for this man.

Neil didn't set foot on Luna until 10:56 p.m. Eastern, the time zone in which this scene took place. The writer may have remembered sunlight slanting in windows when the Eagle landed, at 4:14 p.m., and over decades erased the six-plus seemingly endless hours we had to wait for further action. I fell asleep a couple of times, and only saw Neil's small step because Dad kept prodding us awake. "You'll want to remember this." Which would be ironic, if Dad were this novelist's dad.

Errors can riddle memories through various mechanisms, not all of them booze or playing football without a helmet. We're prone to suggestibility, as evidenced by many of our D.C. office-holders. Someone says a thing, and should it rebound against our cranium in such a way it kinda-sorta seems right, we're done, misled. Misinformation, misattribution, linked and associated information that leads to "gist" memory over details .... To paraphrase Paul Simon, it's a wonder we can think at all.

What are we without memory? Everything happened in our past, except what's in the now, which just became your past, and the now's now .... It's why Alzheimer's and other degenerative dementia afflictions horrify: Lose your memory, lose your self.

Which is no doubt why the tear-jerking specialists producing the closing season of family drama "This Is Us" chose that slow slide for beloved matriarch Rebecca.

In case you've kept your eyeballs dry for these six seasons, "This Is Us" follows the extended Pearson clan from the first dates of Jack (Milo Ventimiglia) and Rebecca (Mandy Moore), through early years raising three kids, and on into multiple futures. Two of the three children Rebecca was carrying made it: Kevin and Kate. The third did not. In a plot twist that we want to make sense because the performers are so engaging, they adopt a child, born the same day but abandoned, a Black son they name Randall. They came to the hospital expecting to bring home three, so following their loss, et voila. That's the backbone: Tragedy, recovery, tranquility; lather, rinse, repeat.

We follow the kids — The Big Three — through infancy, childhood, young adulthood, and adult-adulthood, played by a variety of actors, though in the main we spend time with the adults: Sterling K. Brown as perfectionist Randall; Justin Hartley as feckless golden boy Kevin; and Chrissy Metz as Kate, a sweet child with her mother's musical ear, but who feels overlooked between the boys' out-sized achievements.

That's just a hint, as long-lost family crops up like weeds. Everyone falls in and out of love, marries at least once, raises kids, finds careers, loses ideals ... and all told in non-sequential patchwork. This show has spun so far and wide even the babies of the Big Three have been glimpsed as grown, accomplished adults.

The multi-time-leaping structure means even those who've died aren't gone, ala "Lost" or any science-fiction/fantasy show worth its weight. It just means we'll flash back to them at some point, to rip your heart out again, remembering what we've, well, lost.

Due to the non-sequential nature, Rebecca's decline has been teased for years, as was the death of a major character, well before we saw what happened. As the show winds down with its final episodes, it's clear there will be no miracle cures.

A long-ago tear-jerker that still works, the 1970 "Brian's Song," based on running back Gale Sayers and his roommate Brian Piccolo, chosen to break the color barrier on the old Chicago Bears, begins with this narration by the great character actor Jack Warden, playing Bears coach George Halas: "Ernest Hemingway once said 'Every true story ends in death.' Well, this is a true story."

True story: Hemingway didn't say that. The film's based on Sayers' autobiography, "I Am Third," which I read, long ago. But I can't remember if that was intended as paraphrase, or whether Sayers recalled it wrong.

What Hemingway wrote: "Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you," in his 1932 non-fiction book about bullfighting, "Death in the Afternoon." But the "Brian's Song" paraphrase is punchier, which may explain why it sticks.

Many of the Mandela Effect Top 40 are whimsical, like that people remember the Bugs Bunny/Daffy Duck era of animated shorts as Looney Toons, when they were of course Looney Tunes. Easy to fix that in mind, if you remember its companion series was Merrie Melodies. Far as I know, the use of 'toons as shorthand for cartoon characters exploded with the 1988 blockbuster "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" — and if you thought a question mark ended that title, you've been Mandela-ed — based on the Gary K. Wolf novel "Who Censored Roger Rabbit?" The interrogation point got lost in the adaptation.

There's no Jiffy peanut butter. Never was. There's Jif, which folks conflate with competitor Skippy, thus Jiffy. Curious George didn't have a tail, which is odd, because most recall George as a monkey, and monkeys sport tails. The great apes — chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, bonobos, humans — do not. So either George is an ape, a Barbary macaque (the only monkey without), or the illustrator didn't give a flip.

Brand-name Mandela Effects come from that place in our brains that fills in gaps and typos, where Madison Avenue jerked you around to make you notice: It's Febreze, not Febreeze. Skechers, not Sketchers. Froot Loops, not Fruit Loops. Double Stuf Oreos, not Double Stuff. Oscar Mayer, not Oscar Meyer. Easy, right? But so often wrong.

I'm guessing "This Is Us" will wrap ala "St. Elsewhere," though not as maddeningly out of left field, shown as unfolding from within Rebecca's mind, the scattered sequences due to her failing faculties. This would require leaps, as many of the stories have unfolded without her physical presence, but the way the Pearsons gab, you could glide over that as shared reminiscences. With the wedding song from episode 13, the writers have already shattered the meta barrier between story and storytellers.

Will the fervent fans fall, or as in the so-called failed finales of "Game of Thrones," "Lost," "Battlestar Galactica" and the like, refuse the wrapping?

You can only be truly hurt by those you love. Investment in a series, a work of art, is like falling in love, or like life itself: Limited, overwhelming, unfulfilling, yet also all we've got.

What will we remember, and how will we be remembered? If falsely, does that change the forever now? Too many don't even believe things they've seen, or experienced; their memories warp to the wills of those with a vested interested in reframing truth.

The details must matter. They may be all that matters.

Reach Tusk Editor Mark Hughes Cobb at mark.cobb@tuscaloosanews.com, or call 205-722-0201.

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: In memories, the details may be all that matter| MARK HUGHES COBB