Celebration in Poetry and Memory of the Life for Nancy Paddock is Saturday

Nancy Paddock of Litchfield, who passed away on May 4th at Bethany Memory Care, will be remembered during a program tomorrow at 1:30 at the G.A.R. Hall. Besides teaching English at Litchfield High School for several years, Nancy Paddock authored several award-winning books.

Paddock mostly wrote poetry, and had 4 full-length books of poetry published – A Dark Light, Trust the Wild Heart, Cooking with Pavarotti, and Green Reaching. Trust the Wild Heart was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Awards. She co-authored a book with her husband, Joe Paddock, and Carol Bly – Soil and Survival: Land Stewardship and the Future of American Agriculture. Nancy’s poems also appeared in a many journals and anthologies.

In the 1990s, Nancy’s parents – Ralph and Lois Pearson – began to suffer memory loss, and she and her sisters increasingly cared for them until they entered a Minneapolis nursing home. At the turn of the century, both died of Alzheimer’s, four days apart. Nancy began a family memoir about the slow and difficult demise of her parents, and retired from teaching in 2005 in order to finish it. The book, titled A Song at Twilight: Of Alzheimer’s and Love, won the 2012 Minnesota Book Award in Memoir.

Sadly, Nancy began to show the same symptoms her parents had exhibited during their final years, and she entered Bethany Memory Care in Litchfield in December of 2022. The celebration in poetry and memory of the life of Nancy Paddock is at 1:30 Saturday at the G.A.R. Hall in Litchfield.