Let’s see. Starve a cold and feed a fever. Is that it? Maybe not. Could it be feed a cold and starve a fever? I can’t quite remember, though my jeans are telling me — as I reach for Kleenex — that I’ve been following the wrong advice.
What is it about memory — how and why it wriggles away at times, yet pops back into sharp focus at others?
Whoa! Transported Decades! (Senses Trigger Memories)
It’s funny how expressions return at odd moments. Occasionally, French phrases find their way into my conversational consciousness before their English equivalents, although English is my mother tongue. Go figure… Equally intriguing – when sensory stimulation ignites memories, jolting me back to childhood. It’s instantaneous time travel! And considering the fact that I recall little of my childhood years, when those memories do return, I am surprised.
So, color me confused when I woke with a vile cold four days ago, and despite the scratchy throat, the sneezing fits, the stuffy nose, and the god-awful sluggish feeling in my head — I flashed back to being a kid, sick, “home,” sitting under the covers — and with stunning clarity I was flooded with visual details from my old room. I could see the cocoa-patterned wallpaper with its flecks of cotton-candy pink, the pair of white shaded lamps affixed to two walls, the blue woolen blankets from Jordan’s or Filene’s, and my small desk tucked into an alcove.
There I wasn’t — yet there I was — bundled up, in bed, simultaneously cozy and miserable, working my way through a roll of toilet paper as I blew my runny nose. Just as immediate — the sensation of sipping Campbell’s chicken noodle, my favorite soup as a kid — and no doubt what I would have been served when I was sick.
As for the age I was, who knows? These memories were not time-based, they were sensory — the visual minutiae of my bedroom, the irritation of my stuffy nose, the taste of that slightly salty soup.
Why Do We or Don’t We Remember Childhood?
I have often wondered why I don’t remember most of my childhood.
I can, and sometimes do, recreate all the details of the rooms in my mother’s house — not just my childhood bedroom — right down to the knick-knacks on tables and shelves, the treasured antique objets on the fireplace mantel, and the many etchings and paintings hung on each wall. I can walk through these spaces both in dreams and when I’m awake.
But beyond this keen ability to retain settings?
It is rare that I can unearth explicit memories, and those that I generally can recall are unhappy ones — hurtful interactions with my mother.
The literature on memory mechanisms agrees that memory is revisionist to a degree — we tend to become the heroes of our own stories over time. It is also known that negative events are more likely to be retained, which may explain why I can access particular painful childhood incidents easily. That said, sensory stimuli can bring back both suffused and specific scenes that are pleasant, or at worst, neutral. And I suppose my recent cold-induced time-travel experience fits in this category.
This article from NPR offers one explanation as to why we cannot access childhood memories. However, the article primarily addresses the fragility of memories in early childhood.
… studies provided evidence that at some point in childhood, people lose access to their early memories.
So, which memories are less erasable?
Blocked Memories? Tell Me I’m Not the Only One
According to the same NPR article, we tend to remember “emotional, very significant events” — the example of broken bones and a hospital stay were used — though again, the article’s focus is on the very young.
But what about when we’re 10 or 12 or 15? What about as adults? What about sustained “bad times” — are they sufficient to be blocked like trauma? What about years of living in a troubled household, and the mind’s self-protective powers placing those periods off to the side?
I have nearly no recollection of my father’s funeral following his sudden death, now more than 30 years ago. I would characterize that as traumatic. Yet I recall precisely the moment I felt his passing, and not long after when I received the terrible news by phone. Similarly, I recall receiving the news of my mother’s unexpected death — roughly a dozen years back, and again, I was notified by phone — and I have only a handful of visual memories of her memorial service.
I am assuming that for me — perhaps for all of us — “trauma” has painted its share of blanks and possibly, “ordinary” bad times have done the same, leaving a few that are especially intense that are burned into memory. Or perhaps some of the everyday experiences, with both positive and negative emotional impacts, have only drifted away, retrievable via the right triggers.
Oh, the Good Sense in Our Senses
Speaking of triggers, in addition to intense emotions, we know that taste and smell help strengthen memories along with other sensory triggers. Indeed!
Cue my delight when sipping café au lait flies me to France (with no need for a ticket), lamejun transports me to fun at the kitchen table, and the perfume I have worn for more than a decade leaves me grinning… Eh oui… I’m thinking of the Frenchman who first dabbed my wrist with its spicy scent.
But waking with a nasty cold? A peevish proboscis? Really?
How utterly banal. And how strange a set of sensations to get memory’s ball rolling.
Perhaps my muddled mix of disagreeable symptoms is somehow connected to something I needed and must have experienced — feeling cozy and cared for when I was occasionally sick as a child. Maybe the suddenness of it — I rarely catch cold — is connected with more of an “eventful” emotional experience than I realize: a sense of being safe in an unsafe adult world, and for that matter, in an unsafe household with a mother whose behavior was often erratic.
For now, I’m trying to ration my stash of tissues and avoid going out for more. I’m also steering clear of the fridge. Like I said, my jeans are telling me I need to starve this cold after all, and I’ve definitely been feeding it. Time to trade the ice cream and bagels for Earl Grey and chicken soup.
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Get well soon! Nothing worse than feeling under the weather.
It IS starve a cold, because we tend to eat a lot when we have a cold and not eat when we are really, truly sick as a dog.
Many of our childhood memories are based on stories adults who were there have told us all our lives, or based on the family photo album.
I have memories of places I’ve traveled to (as an adult), but I don’t remember the city or the country. I did travel a LOT for a number of years. I had one recurrent dream involving a lovely, sunlit room with a terra-cotta tile floor, and another of a dark, dank place that smelled slightly of dirt but that made me feel so safe. After a decade away, I returned to Nairobi and realized the sunny room was a terrace of the Norfolk Hotel (in the movie Out of Africa and one of my favorite hangouts) and the dark place was a seed store smack in the middle of downtown, where I would pick up seed packets to try to grow in my garden upcountry.
So my “imaginary” dream world was in fact reality.
It makes me wonder all the more about some other scenes that run through my head. Where in the WORLD was that?????
Virtual tissues on its way!!!
It’s interesting to what our memories, dream state, and mind will take us when we are in bed tending to a cold. Although I cannot remember a specific cold as a child, I do remember when I had the whooping cough! I remember the specific bedroom that I was sleeping in. I remember sleepwalking, back and forth pacing, on top of white sheets that I laid onto the floor at the foot of my bed. My sleepingwalking was my way out of staring at the ceiling that would not stop spinning if I remained laying in bed. I remember that my mom had a hard time keeping me in bed and her astonishment to finding me in that sleepwalk state. I have no triggers from that illness. Odd what we remember! Get well soon!!!
My childhood memories are a bit like Morse Code: a series of dots and dashes. I, too, had an erratic mother with whom I role reversed when I was 12. By the time I was out of high school, I would have run off with the trash collector, if he’d asked me, just to get away from her. One of the most significant events in my life I compartmentalized and stored away in the attic of my memory…. kidnapped in Honduras when I was 38. New Years Eve I started writing a memoir not because I think it would be healthy for me to talk about any of it, but because I’ve lived, shall we say, an unusual life. Hope this finds you feeling better.
DA, please write about feeling the moment of your father’s passing. Totally believe you as I have similar experiences but what is this, do you think? Not spooky and something we have no understanding about. But a thing nonetheless.
It’s very hard for me to write about my dad, much his passing or that moment. But I’ll think about and maybe try. The few people to whom I ever mentioned feeling his death just looked at me like I was nuts, but I know what happened was real.
I will be interested in your experience as well, Maree.
When we visited my out-of-town parents for Thanksgiving in 2000, they informed us that my father had been diagnosed with a form of leukemia. Being curious, we Googled the diagnosis and saw it was serious. Back at home, a few days later, we were out shopping and I got a most uncomfortable and indescribable feeling. It was an overwhelming feeling I should not be where I was. There was no feeling of where I “should” be, just not there! And so strong that I wished I could jump out of my skin to escape it. When we returned home there was a message on our phone (pre-cell phones) saying my dad had been taken to the hospital, where he would eventually pass away a couple of weeks later with no further extrasensory alerts.
Fast forward to 2018/19. My mother was rushed to a variety of emergency facilities over the course of the year and it was clear from early on the end was in sight. No extrasensory warnings, in spite of at least two close brushes with death. By the end of the year she was in a care facility. I stayed with her the week of Christmas, traveled home for a brief rest and was prepared to travel back to visit after New Year’s. The morning before we planned to return, I needed to leave the house to make some trip preparations but, rather oddly, was having a very hard time making myself do it. I attributed it to a reluctance to travel again and forced myself to go on and do what had been planned. A few minutes after I left we received the news my mother had passed away. I later established her final moments had coincided exactly with my anxiety.
I’m not prone to such things. The incident with my father was the first of its kind. The second incident would have been overlooked if not for the first, as it was not nearly as profound, so it may have been my imagining. But the first was a doozy…
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