I’m having flashbacks. Big time.

This started with a personal story told by actor-comedian Jim Carrey. He had a frightening experience that reminded me of a fear I’ve carried since the early ’60s.

I was pulled into his interview by Graham Norton when I heard Carrey say he knew what the last 10 minutes of his life would be like if he knew he was going to die. Because he had that moment.

Carrey was in Hawaii in January 2018 when the island was warned of an incoming ballistic missile and to seek shelter. His assistant, who lives on the other side of the island, called and was crying.

“We have 10 minutes left, chief. What should we do?” she said. Part of that conversation was captured in an accidental screengrab by his assistant because she was so tense, Carrey said. That blurred and bizarre – and symbolic – image now is the cover of a memoir-novel Carrey has written titled “Memoirs and Misinformation.”

“That’s my face when I believed I had 10 minutes left to live,” Carrey said, explaining how he felt as the minutes counted down.

“The feeling was, ‘Wow, that’s kinda weird. What a funny way for it to end.’ And I went into this time of the last 10 minutes. Then I sat down and this overwhelming sense of peace came over me and I started going over a list of gratitude for my life and everything that had happened.”

Carrey said he just closed his eyes and was calm, with about two minutes left. Then he learned it had been a false alert.

There must be hundreds of stories about those minutes of panic. I doubt everyone was as calm as Carrey. How do you deal with such finality? That, of course, is a personal question. A question that flips on the flashbacks I am having.

In October 1962, I was 14 and the fear of a nuclear war was intense during a standoff between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, now known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. I remember standing in our backyard and imagining what it would be like to see a huge mushroom cloud in the distance, followed by the onrushing blast of light, wind and destruction.

This fear hibernates within me. Mostly dormant. But Carrey’s story has me thinking back to two books that reinforced my fear.

In 1964, I read “On the Beach” by Nevil Shute. He provided a powerful, close-up and personal look at what it would be like to be aware of the nuclear destruction of the world while waiting for the radiation horror coming your way. How his characters dealt with that was heart-wrenching. The book was his way of showing what could happen. A warning.

“It’s not the end of the world at all,” said one of his characters. ”It’s only the end for us. The world will go on just the same, only we shan’t be in it. I dare say it will get along all right without us.”

The second book was “Hiroshima” by John Hersey, an amazing work of journalism. He showed the horrifying impact on human life when the United States used the atomic bomb to end the war with Japan. That legacy lives on and on since the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945.

I will continue to carry (and try to bury) my fear of the mushroom cloud, even though threats will linger and sometimes loom. Headlines each week show me what human beings do to each other. Violence is part of our nature. Human kindness and love are also part of our nature. There’s always that choice.

Whatever happens between people, between nations, I assume it will be a human making the final decisions. Making that choice. I admit, sometimes that scares me. Human error caused the Hawaii missile panic.

Let me share a final quote from the novel “On the Beach.” As life on earth is vanishing, the captain of a nuclear submarine chooses to scuttle his boat in the ocean, going down with his ship. To others, he had simply observed: “Maybe we’ve been too silly to deserve a world like this.”

• Lonny Cain, retired managing editor of The Times in Ottawa, also was a reporter for The Herald-News in Joliet in the 1970s. His PaperWork email is lonnyjcain@gmail.com. Or mail the NewsTribune, 426 Second St., La Salle IL 61301.