Synopsis
"A Song at Twilight: Of Alzheimer's and Love" is a feature-length memoir by acclaimed Minnesota poet Nancy Paddock. The book tells the story of her parents' descent into the netherworld of Alzheimer's, and the challenges and choices for care that she and her sisters faced while confronting this most baffling and tragic of diseases, now afflicting millions of people and their families.This is one daughter's story of Lois and Ralph Pearson, whose love of life and each other transcended the darkest moments of war, separation, heartache, and family tragedy to achieve a memorable state of grace spanning six decades of marriage.Paddock recalls her parents' early lives together on St. Paul's East Side, including their playful courtship on the city's ice rinks, as well as her own fond recollections of growing up in the post-war glow of the 1950s and '60s. Reflecting in part on the nature of memory, her book examines the confounding mysteries surrounding Alzheimer's as manifested in Lois and Ralph's experience, while remembering some of the stories that marked one family's journey through life.As scientists, researchers, and health-care professionals seek solutions for a growing epidemic of dementia in an aging population, families from all walks of life face a litany of issues for caring for their failing loved ones, including rising costs, social and political cross-currents, and institutional inertia in the nursing-home industry, among many. Against the odds, A Song at Twilight seeks the perfect place of care, dignity, and respect for our elders.At once tribute, chronicle, meditation, and self-exploration amid great uncertainty, A Song at Twilight searches for meaning in fading photographs and memories while celebrating the ties that bind. For Nancy Paddock, the quest becomes an exploration of the map of her own heart, a journey of struggle, spirit, discovery, and surprise in gratitude for life's gift of renewal found even in the harshest regions of experience the story of how love indeed endures.
About the Author
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY: Nancy Paddock lives and gardens in Litchfield, Minnesota, with her husband, Joe. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including To Sing Along the Way: Minnesota Women Poets From Pre-Territorial Days to the Present; The Writer Dreaming in the Artist's House; As Far As I Can See: Contemporary Writing of the Middle Plains; Beloved on the Earth: 150 Poems of Grief and Gratitude; From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright; Farming Words; and County Lines.Her book Trust the Wild Heart, a finalist for the 2006 Minnesota Book Award in poetry, was published by Red Dragonfly Press, which will also release Cooking With Pavarotti in 2011.Born in St. Paul in 1942, Paddock has been a writer-in-residence for COMPAS Writers and Artists in the Schools, the Southwest Minnesota Arts & Humanities Council, Minnesota Public Radio station KRSW, and other organizations. She worked for the National Endowment for the Humanities/Farmers Union-sponsored American Farm Project, which engaged young farmers in humanities-based discussions about land and environment, and for the Minnesota-based Land Stewardship Project, an organization dedicated to sustainable and environmentally sound agriculture. In connection with that work, she wrote two environmental plays and, with Joe Paddock and Carol Bly, co-authored Soil and Survival: Land Stewardship and the Future of American Agriculture (Sierra Club, 1986).
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