Piecing Together My Father’s Murder

In August 1999, Eren Orbey’s father was murdered while their family was on vacation in Turkey. He was only 3 years old. As he grew up, most of what he learned about his dad and the murder was through the internet, or from bits of information gleaned from his older sister, G. In this personal narrative, Orbey recounts his own investigation into his father’s death.

I felt caught in a peculiar quandary. If I repeated details that G had already written down, was I relying on a primary source or appropriating what my peers in creative-writing workshops would call her “lived experience”? The tautology maddened me. I had lived the experience, too, yet I felt like either a mimic, reciting my family’s recollections, or a fabulist, mistaking my imagination for fact. My ignorance isolated me from G and our mom. I had a sense that I was hammering on a bolted door, begging them to admit me to an awful place. And why would I want to get in? Well, because they were there.