Secrets

My family had a few secrets.  I didn't learn till I was in my late 30s that I wasn't born in a hospital as I'd always thought.  My mother actually gave birth in the car on the way to the hospital!  Oh well, who wants to have been born inside a hospital anyway?  

Another was my mother's age.  I didn't learn till just before her death that she was about ten years older than my father!

Have you noticed that some science fiction movies have the cliche of the government hiding a big secret?  Like the '70s dystopian drama Soylent Green, where the secret is that the food substance allowing the burgeoning population to survive is actually recycled human corpses!

I once saw a fine French movie directed by Bertrand Tavernier, titled Life and Nothing But...  Philippe Noiret plays an officer in the French army just after the Western Front carnage of World War I, whose job is to take the list of missing French soldiers and see if he can identify any of them among the unidentified dead, to give their families "closure."  He finds one corpse that he can identify, but finds out that this soldier was a bigamist, and he meets his two wives, neither of whom know of the other.  In the end the officer lets him stay unidentified so that his secret won't come out and the widows won't be hurt even more than they already have been. (My apologies if you didn't want it spoiled!)