Edward asked David, “What will your legacy be?” As we walked down State Street in Madison, Wisconsin, the response was, “To have been a good son, friend, and a supportive husband and father one day.”
Edward remembers reading this once, and it inspired him to ask David that question on one of our first dates:
There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.
When a loved one is no longer with us physically, it can be healing to reminisce the best of times, often captured in prints or on film. We started to unearth the importance of digitizing old photographs to preserve their memory.
In our new home, we plan to reproduce some of these images into a gallery wall that we’ll title “Our roots.”
David had a close bond with his late grandparents and wanted others to be able to feel similar connections with their own families. So he created a ghostwriting service during college and wrote biographies for families and small businesses. He continued this for a couple of years after graduating before he began his career in healthcare IT.
The process was remarkable as David recorded oral histories of the “authors” in their own words with a storytelling focus, transcribed them, and the writing was uniquely theirs for close loved ones and friends to enjoy. Treasured old photographs were scanned and included in the books to complement the copy.
These biographical memoirs were self-published, and a few were archived in local libraries at the discretion of the individuals and their families. We’ll continue to document our own stories and share them here. As we work on completing our first book together for a friend’s family, we look forward to living our legacy.
We started to unearth the importance of digitizing old photographs to preserve their memory. As part of Edward’s mourning journey, he decided to continue to prioritize scanning photos because he feared that they would be damaged by a catastrophic event and perish.
Edward’s father passed away this August 2022. When a loved one is no longer with us physically, it can be healing to reminisce the best of times, often captured in prints or on film.
We are an interracial, same-sex married couple, on our journey of building a family, turning our house into a home and capturing our daily adventures.
