Flashbacks

The Internet can give you all kinds of definitions and reasons for flashbacks. Simply, they are intrusive thoughts, reoccurrences of a memory, usually traumatic, that pop back into your head unbidden. I had them a lot right after John passed away. The vision of finding him already gone was burned into my mind and haunted me. Then with time and help from a therapist I was able to make peace with the vision and it wasn't so hurtful. I thought I had the situation under control.
Silly me.
I was back in New York this past weekend visiting family. The same family John and I were visiting when he died. I was in the same apartment where we had laughed and shared happy times, the same house where we had our last meal together, where he told me I needed to take care of myself because he did not want to be here without me, where we took pictures so we would remember the good time.
And then the mental pictures came back. The sight of John gone from me forever, the feeling of complete devastation of knowing he was irretrievably gone. I could hear the sirens as the ambulance sped through the street to our hotel. I could hear my own screams in the room. I remembered it all in searing detail. The panic and the fear and the sadness. The all engulfing sadness. A sadness that brings you to your knees. A sadness that comes from a place so deep in your soul you didn't even know it existed until then. All of it has returned.
It will probably subside again. But right now it has me beaten. I try not to dwell on those memories. I want to remember John in happy times. I want to remember all our good times together.
Our life together was good. The best.
But those flashbacks are tearing me apart.