As the Shadows Fell

The news did not surprise her. A decade ago, Nancy Reagan took her beloved Ronnie to the Mayo Clinic. The former president, her soulmate of more than 40 years, had been forgetting things, repeating himself, trying but failing to do the simplest things. When the doctors returned with their devastating verdict--Alzheimer's, then a relatively new term--Nancy was already braced for the worst. "By the time you go in to get checked out," a source close to the Reagan family told NEWSWEEK, "something has given you the idea that there is something very wrong." Discovering what the enemy was, though, did not make the toll the disease would take any easier to bear. In 1994, "nobody knew what to expect," the family insider recalled. "We didn't know what questions to ask, what to talk about, what the future would be like." Mrs. Reagan did know one thing: the man who called her his "roommate" and wrote her softly sentimental love letters in their fifth decade of marriage was going to leave her--slowly, painfully, bit by bit.

And so began what Nancy called her husband's "long goodbye," which was, for her, 10 years of exacting caregiving, hurried lunches with friends, ever-briefer phone calls to the outside world, hours spent with old love letters and powerful advocacy for new research into cures for the disease that was taking Ronnie from her.

Through the long years after the diagnosis, she never wavered. She stood by him, rarely leaving his side for more than an hour or two. The story of her devotion over the last decade is in a way grim and unrelieved, but also tender and loving. The woman once mocked as a Lady Who Lunched showed more true grit than any cowboy Ronald Reagan ever played.

The former president himself had seen how difficult his descent would be, and as always, his first thoughts had been of Nancy. "Unfortunately, as Alzheimer's disease progresses," the former president wrote in his last letter to the country, "the family often bears a heavy burden. I only wish there was some way I could spare Nancy from this painful experience. When the time comes I am confident that with your help she will face it with faith and courage."

Mrs. Reagan's "faith and courage" were on vivid display last week as she led the nation in mourning her husband, who died on June 5 at the age of 93. Under the Capitol Dome, on a gloomy morning, she had kissed the coffin. She had stood there in the rain, a solitary figure, slightly stooped and frail, an 82-year-old woman who had lost the love of her life. She had never liked to be apart from him. Back in 1981, the night before she flew to England alone to attend the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer, Nancy had wept at the thought of being away from Ronnie for even a few days. At the White House, the First Lady had been portrayed in the media as a hard woman, a fashionista who flaunted her finery and plotted to fire her husband's aides. The real insiders knew better; they understood that she could be determined and even relentless, but also emotionally fragile. She seemed to carry all her husband's cares for him. "She never slept much; he did," recalled a close friend. "He never worried about anything; she worried about everything."

But last Friday, a day of liturgy and ceremony before her husband's final rest, she was determined to be stoic and serene. In the long, creeping darkness of his disease, he had slowly withdrawn, drifted away, even from her. Now she was bringing him back, into the sunlit realm of symbol and legend. Not since Jacqueline Kennedy has a First Lady better grasped her husband's own myth, and worked with such craft and loving devotion to enlarge and enshrine it.