Ronald Reagan's daughter writes with a moving openness about losing
her father to Alzheimer's disease. The simplicity with which she
reveals the intensity, the rush, the flow of her feelings
encompasses all the surprises and complexities that ambush us when
death gradually, unstoppably invades life.
In "The Long Goodbye, Patti Davis describes losing her father to
Alzheimer's disease, saying goodbye in stages, helpless against the
onslaught of a disease that steals what is most precious-a person's
memory. "Alzheimer's," she writes, "snips away at the threads, a
slow unraveling, a steady retreat; as a witness all you can do is
watch, cry, and whisper a soft stream of goodbyes."
She writes of needing to be reunited at forty-two with her mother
("she had wept as much as I over our long, embittered war"), of
regaining what they had spent decades demolishing; a truce was
necessary to bring together a splintered family, a few weeks before
her father released his letter telling the country and the world of
his illness . . .
The author delves into her memories to touch her father again, to
hear his voice, to keep alive the years she had with him.
She writes as if past and present were coming together, of her
memories as a child, holding her father's hand, and as a young
woman whose hand is being given away in marriage by her father . .
. of her father teaching her to ride a bicycle, of the moment when
he let her go and she went off on her own . . . of his teaching her
the difference between a hawk and a buzzard . . . of the family
summer vacations at a rented beach house-each of them tan, her
father looking like the athlete he was, with a swimmer's broad
shoulders and lean torso.. . . She writes of how her father never
resisted solitude, in fact was born for it, of that strange reserve
that made people reach for him. . . . She recalls him sitting at
his desk, writing, staring out the window . . . and she writes
about the toll of the disease itself, the look in her father's
eyes, and her efforts to reel him back to her.
Moving . . . honest . . . an illuminating portrait of grief, of a
man, a disease, and a woman and her father.
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