The Healing Journey

June 28, 2025

For his 67th birthday, David got a photo scanner from his family. You could say it was the perfect gift for a man who has everything … and a lot of time on his hands. As he entered what they call the senior years, the future looked a lot different from the past.

He felt a photo scanner was just what he needed to preserve posterity, as they say, and it gave him an opportunity to spend retirement doing something more meaningful than just painting the closets.

He planned to take that enormously large box of photos, which included his family’s photos and his parents’ photos and just about every other photo he had been taken over decades and digitize them, organize them and share them with his kids, and anyone else who wanted to remember the loved ones they lost.

But the project, he quickly realized, involved more than putting several thousand faded and wrinkled snapshots and Polaroids through the scanner and filing them. It took longer because so many of the photos resurrected intimate memories he had forgotten.

Every so often, he would come upon World War II photos of his father, who served in Europe and took part in the Liberation of Paris. There was a photo of his father at 18, in basic training and standing at the foot of the Eiffel Tower and walking down the Champs-Élysées with his buddies. Who was that young man?

There were aunts and uncles and cousins, most of them gone now, pictured in an entirely different era, wearing different clothes and driving different cars.

And as he scanned the photos, he felt several emotions: loneliness that they were gone, joy because they had been part of his life, and anticipation that they would all be reunited again someday.

He shared his work with his children and told them, “This is what our family is all about. Be proud.”
©J Pisani

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