During the last years of her life, I watched my mother’s memory decline, fade. Whether an inability of her brain to synthesize vitamin B or simply the flooding in of wisdom, the connections – that easy way she had of reaching for just the right word or the way she keep current with all her childen's lives as if juggling colorful balls in the air --- were gradually replaced by loss of enthusiasm for her crossword puzzles and by repeated repeated repeated fragments of stories, mere flickers of the images that had sustained her. In these years, Evangeline Hemenway Roberts grew increasingly childlike, dependent on others -- especially my brother Tony and his wife Sherry who lived nearby, and some devoted housekeepers and friends - to see her safely from one day to the next, to help her find her way to those stories of her past which more and more became the only places she could go for comfort. I suspect the path memory takes through time reveals itself to each of us in a similar way. I grow more forgetful as days and years pass. Is this what it means to be human? Making art allows us to suspend nurturing images and stories in a kind of unfading light so we might bathe in the knowledge there is nothing to fear, everything to celebrate, about being alive.