My grandmother sometimes forgets who I am. When I visit, I am struck by the stillness that surrounds her dementia. In that silence, memory behaves strangely. It flickers, retracts, resurfaces, and slips away again.

She believed her mother came back as a bird. After her mother died, she kept watch for her in the trees and set birdhouses along the edge of her home. When she moved to a memory care center, they came with her. I made one for her.

Inside is a handmade accordion book. It opens in a single long strip, and the images shift and blur as it unfolds, the way she tells her life now, in pieces that dissolve before they settle.

The birdhouse feels familiar and tender, but has become a place of confinement, housing the instability my grandmother lives inside every day. In the roof, an archival photograph of my great-grandmother, folded into a raven, sits in shadow, a place where fear of an inherited illness has been ingrained through generations.

My intent was not to document her decline, but to understand the fragile fabric of memory itself.