I’m Winning: Gratitude, the Loudest Voice in the Room

A conversation I didn’t expect

On June 29, I arrived at the Thomas H. Corey VA Medical Center with one assignment: photograph the America 250 event celebrating our nation’s history. Straightforward. A simple task.

But like a lot of Veterans, I didn’t walk in to work that day leaving everything at the door. I carried stress, family problems, frustration, anxiety, and a worn‑down social battery. I wasn’t in a terrible place, but I wasn’t in a great one either. My goal was to stay quiet, do the job, and get through the day.

Then a fellow Veteran, Andre Quinton, approached me.

He was soft‑spoken and physically frail. He smiled kindly and said he was waiting on permission to play the piano.

That could have been the end of the interaction.

Instead, for the next few minutes, I found myself talking with Andre—completely caught off guard by how quickly the conversation shifted. He told me he had been fighting cancer for six years. Then he smiled, steady and sure, and said, “I’m winning.”

“I’m winning.”

Not because cancer was gone.
But because he found something bigger than it.

Nearly everything he said centered on gratitude, gratitude for another day, gratitude for the VA doctors and nurses, gratitude for the people who sat with him through treatments, and gratitude for the chance to sit at a piano and play a song.

He shared that this journey taught him what love really looks like. That without love, life fades quickly. That the compassion he found inside this building helped carry him through some of the hardest moments of his life.

Listening to him, my perspective shifted fast. Nothing about my life had changed. The problems were still waiting outside that atrium. 

But somehow, they felt smaller.

One Veteran reminded another Veteran what truly matters. 

I watched Andre sit at the piano.

I raised my camera out of habit, but I wasn’t thinking about shutter speeds or angles anymore. I was thinking about everything his hands had carried—military service, family, pain, treatment, hope.

Hands that carried a lifetime

The photo I captured isn’t just a picture of a man playing piano. It’s a photograph of resilience, of gratitude, of choosing joy when life gives you every reason not to.

I came to the VA that morning to capture an America 250 celebration through my lens.
I left with something far more important.

Freedom is fought for every day, sometimes on distant battlefields, sometimes in hospital rooms, and sometimes simply by choosing gratitude over hopelessness.

That Veteran reminded me that gratitude doesn’t ignore suffering.
It just refuses to let suffering have the final word.

For Veterans who battling cancer, you do not walk this road alone. Learn more about cancer care at the Thomas H. Corey VA Medical Center by visiting West Palm Beach VA Healthcare System