The Healing Journey

April 30, 2026

“Everyone, deep down within, carries a small cemetery of those he has loved.”
— Romain Rolland

Cynthia was Betty’s only daughter. She had a little box, like the cigar boxes that you would see in a smoke shop years ago, and inside that box where the greatest treasures of her family’s life — snapshots they had taken over the years, many of them black and white and faded.

Every so often, her mother was inspired by nostalgia or perhaps grief, to get the box out and go through the photos with her daughter. With each photo that she held in her hand, she imparted a story — some recollection that she had carried with her for decades that seemed to define the person who had died.

The ritual the two women observed was always the same. As Cynthia says: “I came to know them very well, and this became a little ceremony once in a while….I’d see her with the box on the kitchen table, and I knew it was time to sit down with her and let her tell her stories and share her little memories.

“So when I got older, I realized that even though I never got to know my grandmother — who died when my mother was only 7 — my mother’s memories of her made her real to me. She was part of me and my life. One time our family drove to the cemetery where she was, and I finally got to be physically close to her and it meant a lot to me.”

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