They Didn't Know Yet
What a Family Photo Taught Me About How To Move Through The World
There’s a photo I’ve been staring at lately. My mom on the right, my aunt on the left, and my grandmother standing between them. The matriarch, the anchor, the one who always seemed a little more composed than the rest of us.
They’re standing in a living room I never stepped foot in (at least I don’t think so), but I swear I know the couch pattern by heart. Probably because every Jewish grandmother in the tri-state area had one like it.
The kind of room where birthdays were celebrated and disappointments got whispered in the kitchen.
And I keep thinking: they didn’t know yet. They didn’t know what was coming. The heartbreaks, the breakthroughs, and the slow unfolding of middle age. They didn’t know how heavy the years would get or how strong they’d turn out to be.
They certainly didn’t know my mom would raise a kid who’d grow up to stare at this photo from halfway around the world; overthinking it, probably writing about it, and definitely crying into his third cup of Vietnamese coffee.
They couldn’t have known which parts of themselves would stick or how many versions of themselves they’d outgrow. Could they have known they would become mythic? Not the Odyssey mythic. Just family mythic.
The kind of mythic where someone says, “You know what your mom would’ve said about this?” and everyone suddenly straightens up. The kind that brings a smile and a quiet ache. I’m almost certain they didn’t know how lucky I’d feel to have this image.
Not because it captured a milestone, but because it didn’t. It’s just a moment. A regular day and a soft kind of together. That’s what gets me now. Not the fashion or the setting, but the stillness. That someone thought to say, “Let’s get a photo,” and they paused long enough to listen.
I look at them and wonder what I don’t know yet and what I’m standing in the middle of right now that won’t make sense for another decade. I wonder what I’ll wish I had paused for. Whose arm I’ll wish I had around me.
I’m not retired retired, but in some ways I’ve retired from a whole period of my life. The striving and shouldering-it-all years where I thought urgency meant importance. Lately, I’ve been more interested in stillness.
In memories that sneak up on you, not milestones that announce themselves.
These extraordinary women, two of which are no longer with us, are just standing there. Arm in arm, they’re unaware they were teaching me something I’d only understand decades later; that if you’re lucky, someone might look back one day and say: “That mattered.”
And yeah, I know the world feels upside down. Everything’s accelerating. We’re all wondering when AI’s going to take our jobs, write our eulogies, or remix this photo into a hologram slideshow at my future wake. (Please don’t.)
Some days, it feels like nothing is going to be what it used to be.
But maybe the antidote isn’t to go faster. Maybe it’s to look backward just long enough to remember who we come from. For some that’s a more painful story, but we can all look upon those stories and trace the outlines of their ordinary days and find our own breath again.
Because they didn’t know yet. And we don’t either. Which means anything is still possible. So maybe that’s the point: We don’t need to know what’s coming so much as we need to be there when the picture’s taken.
To stand close. Closer than feels comfortable, even. To stop hiding behind the camera and just be in the frame. To pause long enough to matter. And if we’re lucky, someone might look back one day and say: “That mattered.”
One can only hope.
