Aging with Gratitude™: Meet the Luckiest Unlucky Person Alive
A portrait session and conversation with Janet Eggen, 81
Janet told me she is both the luckiest and unluckiest person she has ever known.
After spending time with her in her beautiful home, I believe her.
Janet and I met through local outreach. I was looking for interesting people to connect with, hear their stories, and capture a black-and-white portrait. She was the first stranger who said yes.
The project is called Aging with Gratitude. I go into the community and sit across from people who have lived enough life to stop pretending. People who have suffered, rebuilt, lost, forgiven, and kept going. I listen. Then I make a portrait.
Janet’s portrait carries a quiet elegance
Against the black backdrop, her silver hair, soft smile, and bright eyes seem to hold both grace and strength. There is nothing forced in her expression.
She looks open, composed, and fully present, the way someone looks when they have lived long enough to need no longer to prove anything.
The color version brings warmth to her face and depth to her blue eyes, while the black-and-white version strips the image down to light, shadow, and character.
What remains is dignity.
Beauty, yes, but not the shallow kind. This is the beauty of a woman who has lived, endured, learned, and still chooses to meet the world with softness.
Janet is exactly who this project exists for
She was born in Europe in 1945. The Holocaust devastated her family. Janet has no memory before age five.
In 1949, her uncle sponsored her, her grandmother, and her aunt to come to America. They crossed the Atlantic on a huge military ship and landed in Miami.
She grew up during the postwar boom
Her mother worked on a factory floor, saved her money, and eventually found success in real estate. She prospered. She was also driven at the expense of her family. Janet noticed.
Janet attended Boston University, studied English literature, and began her adult life working in finance in Manhattan. She married, had a daughter, divorced when her daughter was two, returned to graduate school, and earned a Master’s degree in clinical psychology.
Somewhere along the way, her worldview shifted from a capitalist one to a humanist one. She did not say that like a confession. She said it like an observation. It became part of her struggle, her transformation, and her search for meaning.
Loss kept finding her
Her father died suddenly of a heart attack at 68. Her mother died at 56 of a cerebral hemorrhage. Feeling orphaned and unmoored, Janet said she made some choices she now describes as stupid. She married again. It did not last.
Later, Janet married a psychiatrist. Together, they built a clinical practice specializing in early brainwave biofeedback therapies. At one point, they operated five offices. She called it a tough business, but she was grateful for it because of the people they helped.
Then, in 1995, she lost her daughter.
Suddenly. Without warning.
That kind of loss can break a person.
Janet kept going
What followed was a search, she said, for a sound foundation. Janet became a seeker. She visited psychics. She was desperate to find her daughter somewhere. Her brother died not long after. Her husband had an affair. She left him shortly after they moved to Arizona in 1999 and started over from nothing.
She enrolled at the Scottsdale Culinary Institute because she loved to cook and needed something to love. Not long after, she met her current husband. They are very different people. They have been married 18 years, and by every measure she offered, it has been a happy life.
Janet practices yoga regularly
She plays tennis three times a week. She lit up when she told me about the massive abstract oil painting on her kitchen wall. Janet herself is radiant.
Her soul exudes warmth and serenity. Young at heart.
One of her favorite lines is, “If you have an address book, you have a ministry.”
I asked Janet what she is most grateful for. She did not hesitate.
“I’m most grateful for the love I received from so many people, which gave me the ability to love others.”
That stayed with me
I asked her what she had learned from all of it, the losses, the rebuilding, and the long arc of a life that refused to stay broken. She said the tough things taught her how to get up.
She said the greatest gift she received was love from others, and that love taught her how to give it back. She believes she has been protected by guardian angels her whole life.
We talked about life as I set up my photography lighting and backdrop. She showed me around her home. She told me her story without drama, without self-pity, and without pretending the pain had not been real.
That is what struck me most
Janet has known more loss than many people could carry. She has also known love, beauty, art, friendship, marriage, service, and gratitude. She has suffered. She has rebuilt. She has kept her heart open.
She is both the luckiest and the unluckiest person she has ever known.
After spending time with Janet Eggen, I think she might be right on both counts.
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