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Moving . . . honest . . . an illuminating portrait of grief, of a man, a disease, and a woman and her father.
Plume
October 2005
Featuring: Ronald Reagan
224 pages ISBN: 0452286875 Trade Size (reprint)
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Non-Fiction Biography
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.
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