I found my long deceased father’s childhood drawings from 1948, and it changed how I see him.
Last month while visiting my elderly mother, I was going through some old family boxes of photos and found something I didn’t even know existed — a small stack of drawings my father made in 1948 when he was just a boy. My mother told me that I could have them so I put them in a folder and set it aside until just recently.
I’ve seen photos of him as a young adult, but he rarely shared stories of his childhood…however seeing these drawings felt different. It was like meeting a version of him I never had access to — imaginative, innocent, and full of a kind of quiet creativity I never realized he had.
It brought up a lot of emotions. Grief, curiosity, connection. I found myself wanting to understand who he was before he became my father.
I ended up making a short film about what those drawings revealed to me and how they helped me rediscover him in a way I didn’t expect. If anyone here is interested, I’ll leave it below.