Carole Treston had been a nurse early in her career when she and her mother traveled to Washington, D.C., and saw the AIDS Memorial Quilt laid out across the National Mall.

The quilt, first displayed on the Mall in 1987, had become a living memorial to people lost during the AIDS epidemic. Treston, now the executive director of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care and a member of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV and AIDS (PACHA), still remembers the quiet that fell over her mother as they walked.

They moved slowly between the rows of hand-stitched panels, each honoring a life cut short. Her mother stopped in front of a section filled with birth years close to Treston's own.

"She said, most of these have birth dates around the same as you,'" Treston recalled nearly four decades

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