A Blog of Flashbacks

Pleasant Flashbacks of Life

August 2024

We think of flashbacks as negative, those from post-traumatic stress. How about we turn that around and think about the pleasant flashbacks of life? Do we have any? Do I have any? When I looked up pleasant flashbacks on the internet, I found they have a name: involuntary autobiographical memories. They are as powerful as the PTSD ones. As I began to list my pleasant flashbacks, I saw they all fell into the somatic, or sensory, area. Some are olfactory. Others are pleasant flashbacks of sights, sounds, touches, or even combinations. Yes. I also have one that is a combination of ecstatic and terrifying sensations. The triggers of negative flashbacks are almost always not pleasant.

In summer, I have pleasant flashback of my mother. She wears a casual yet tailored dress and low, broad heels, the kind of heels for gardening then. No matter what she wears, she always looks elegant. She walks towards me with her slight but beautiful smile lighting her face. I write this in the present because what I see is real. She is walking to one of the many gardens at our home in Framingham Centre or in Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden, close to our flat there. I see her approaching. I smell her natural fragrance and feel the softness of her cheeks and hands.

I look to the right of my desk and walk into the photograph of the Fifteenth Street Meetinghouse in New York City. I feel calm. A sense of peace fills me. I smell the wood of the benches and the long horsehair cushions covered in red. I touch the one I sit on. It looks like velvet, but feels not quite that soft. The memory and the smell emanate from within the meetinghouse.

I smell the trees outside my childhood bedroom window and the open French doors to the deck porch. Spring and summer green. I watch breezes whisper Norway maple and cutleaf maple leaves. The change of the smell of the air. Soft sounds of raindrops fall on the leaves.

As the sun shines in the Tongass National Rain Forest today, all life dries out. The moss, four inches thick, crunches softly underfoot. I hate to walk on it, thinking I must wait till it’s damp again so it will not crunch. Suddenly this Alaska rain forest of pine, spruce, and hemlock smells of the pine woods of Colorado’s mountains. I wrap myself in the intimacy of isolation.

Picnic table where Capt. Tom and I sometimes sit.

I sat at the picnic table at the Gustavus beach. Capt. Tom, my great-grandfather, dead 59 years before I was born, and I sat together and had a chat. We sat by the water, a rare privilege for him just to sit but not an unusual activity for me. His work was on the ocean. Mine lies drifting after him.

The view Capt. Tom and I have.

We spoke of the shallowness of Georges Bank and the Grand Banks. He said he never goes near Sable Island, Nova Scotia’s graveyard of ships. I told him of the Fairweather Grounds and its great fishing before the drop off to the rest of the Pacific. Long ago glaciers determined the geography and topography of each of these shallow areas.

Capt. Thomas Acker, my great-grandfather. He was captain of three-masted Atlantic schooners trading between Nova Scotia and the West Indies. I'm rather fond of him and am slowly writing a historical novel about him

He crossed his legs at the ankles and his right hand rested on the bench where we sat. I reached to touch it, to pat the hand of this honorable Capt. Tom. Broad hands and fat fingers like my father’s. I stroked the roughness of the back of his hand and fingers, the hand of a working seaman. I smiled.

“Why do you smile?”

“Because I am honored to call you Grandfather.”

I told him how my father, his grandson, kept his garage, garden shed, and workshop in shipshape order. I still feel the perfect order of our gardens and yard as I meander through them picking the aberrant weed as I see it. There is no other word for it. Shipshape. Finding the right tool immediately if something goes wrong aboard. He looks at me and smiles with that ever-present twinkle in his eyes. Lost in our own thoughts, we look out at the strait.

Another frequent flashback has been simultaneously ecstatic and terrifying. The crescendo to a seizure is ecstasy. She leaves her body, a wonderful departure, her voyage into the unknown. She watches dizziness as, suddenly terrified, she careens to the floor, or sinks into the folds of the mattress. Sometimes she loses consciousness and doesn’t know where she ends up till she comes to. How long did she leave? She never knows but it seems an hour not a minute or seconds. She vomits or pees, both or neither. She is disoriented. Sometimes her husband comes to her aid. Sometimes it’s emergency medical techs. Then she relaxes for the worst part of the seizure is over and someone else is in control.

What is this immediacy and sense of scenes that appear to me? I have no answer to that question. These are some of the pleasant flashbacks of my life. I used to think it odd, or crazy, that they occurred. I was 35 when I finally told a therapist. He told me I had a gift. A gift to sense things that aren’t there? That’s an odd gift. As I have told more people they also said I had a gift. I thought it was a gift to survive a deadly illness, be intelligent, attractive, athletic, have good genes, or to receive a beautiful scarf from my son’s partner. But a gift to sense things that are not there? That seemed odd, but when so many tell me they do not do that—see moving scenes, remember details, dream in color, hear the ocean turn into music when walking—yes, maybe it is a gift. To have pleasant memories that become living present moments, yes, it is a gift.