Origin Story
“It’s hard to watch the decline and sometimes hard to visit but it weighs on me not to,” she said. Her father had always been an elaborate storyteller and an alive, vibrant man with a big voice.
She described the move from the house he had known to her house and to a facility, all during Covid, and the guilt she had felt about not being able to keep him out of care when the dementia became too severe and his behavior too hard to handle. She was a schoolteacher and theatre director with a busy schedule but who always figured out a way to go sit with her dad and to be the primary person he could count on no matter what.
“I knew since I was a child that I wanted to do this for him if he needed. I feel blessed that I can.”
Nancy S. Scherlong, Listener Poet
Listener Poet Session
February 2025
Stories with My Father
By Nancy S. Scherlong, Listener Poet
He points to his head,
to the corduroy hat I gave him –
“I got this from a marine, nice guy.”
It hurts my heart.
I don’t correct him.
Most of the time they are dark;
a gunman in the facility,
and sometimes true –
our brother dying again (and again),
or the baby that lived only a few hours.
We are sucked quickly
into the loud television, lost
in the days’ bad news.
We float and bob
in the rushing
river of memory.
“That’s mom,” I tell him,
when he asks the name
of the woman in the picture.
How does the mind sift?
What gets through?
And don’t we all tell ourselves stories –
How different my own ending will be,
How things won’t change without my knowing,
How we all think we have time.
