Glimpsies
15 September 2026
Glimpsies
It’s a word my Dad used a lot. Here I’m going to describe what it means to me and what it taught me about memory.
The below is something I said at the funeral.
”” He had a word he used for the little memories, often mundane, that come back to you every once in a while when triggered by a place or a person: glimpsies. Very often, as we were walking through Arbroath, or we were watching football, or we were interacting, he’d say “I’ve just had one of my wee little glimpsies”, and share the particular event or time or person he was thinking of. “”
He would use it in a nostalgic, melancholic way. Each was an ode to the past he couldn’t quite believe was the past. They often interacted with the loss of close family members. But he used it, also, in a life-affirming way. As a reminder that we all get one go - as far as we understand - at life, and to make it count. They were always invoked alongside a begrudging appreciation for the fleeting beauty of life. At their most foundational, glimpsies are simply memories. Threads which, though frayed, connect us through time.
It would be easy to think of the passage of time as a one dimensional detriment to memory. That all memories fade monotonically as a picture does when subject to the light of the sun. This view seems to be the common understanding of memory. But I suppose one thing about glimpses is they show that this isn’t quite the case. You often don’t remember the glimpsie (guessing at the singular) until you pass by the place it happened, or see someone else doing something you used to do. My Dad’s use of the word would often be triggered by seeing one of us running around playing, or walking past an old haunt of his. And in the moment the glimspie washes over you - see, you don’t really have control over the conjuring of them - the memory is vivid.
A sceptical response to this so far might be something like: sure, but all you have said is that in certain moments you can more vividly remember something than others, couldn’t it be that, regardless of when the glimpsie comes, it will get less and less vivid as time goes by? But beyond requiring the place and relation ribboning, I have experienced my own memories both dull and clarify simultaneously with time.
Take the memories I hold of my adventures, for example. They change over time, certainly, but fade is not the right descriptor. They lose some detail but then other parts become strikingly clear. They become impressionistic accounts, filled with inaccuracies and blurriness, and at the same time themes and patterns. Liberated from the burden to impart perfect information that comes with immediacy, memories grow in importance. They are fewer but more intense. Instead of a collection of factual events, I find that I start to more holistically understand how something made me feel, or what the atmosphere was like. These sorts of things don’t seem to be at my fingertips immediately, but somehow as time goes by they are slowly illuminated, like sea salt crystals showing themselves only after the evaporation of the surrounding water.
Memories are, in this sense, almost alive. They affect you and you affect them. They can never hope to be replicas of the past - nor should we wish them to be - and this only becomes more pronounced as the memory and ourselves age. So I would suggest that to say memories simply fade misses the point.
Rather, they mature and reveal such richness over the time you spend with them.