This article is a personal narrative of a teaching artist reaching out to persons ill, elderly, and their caregivers because of his own experiences with cancer. As a teaching artist, the author serves schools and communities as an art critic, that is, one who facilitates discussions about works of art made by the learners or by established artists. Recently, he engaged small groups of people to look at works of contemporary art and to write about those artworks and what they meant to their lives. The article includes brief interpretations of life and art that these people wrote while knowing that what they wrote might be publicly shared with the hope that their writings would help others. The article gives witness to curative powers of art for both the teaching artist and those with whom he worked. The purpose of the article is to explore the effects of illness on a teaching artist, to share the power of art to positively affect lives, and to encourage teaching artists to work with the ill and the elderly, and their caregivers. (Contains 2 notes.)