Losing Her Marbles

Losing Her Marbles. Created 2025. Digital Collage (PowerPoint)

There’s something strangely tender about watching memory loosen its grip on someone you love. It doesn’t happen all at once. It begins with the small things—keys in the freezer, a forgotten name, the punchline to a story she told a thousand times. And slowly, the pieces begin to drift.

I’ve always hated the phrase “losing your marbles.” It reduces something deeply human to a punchline. But in this piece, I imagined what would happen if the marbles didn’t fall away or roll into the dark. What if they floated? What if they became planets—colorful, alive, swirling around her like a universe she once held together?

The woman at the center of this piece carries a certain elegance, the kind that isn’t manufactured but earned. The pearls, the posture, the quiet insistence on lipstick no matter what life has taken from her. She is steady even as the world around her becomes unmoored.

The marbles represent memory, yes, but also stories, identities, former versions of ourselves. Some stay close. Some drift into the background. Some come back unexpectedly, bright as ever. We never really lose the things that made us who we are—they just change orbit.

I wanted this piece to hold both beauty and ache. Humor and heartbreak. The kind of contradiction that defines the last chapters of life: how someone can seem to fade and yet reveal more truth, more softness, more soul than they ever did before.

Maybe the question this piece asks is simple:What are the memories you cling to, and which ones have started to float away?And more importantly:Who are you becoming as the old stories release their hold?

This piece is a living work. What you see here is only one version in time.