Ronald Reagan was not my favorite president, to say the least, but even I was touched by the letter that he wrote ten years ago. In that letter, addressed to the American people, he explained that he had Alzheimer’s disease and had decided to make the fact public.

He did so because good effects had already been produced when he had disclosed news of his own cancer surgeries and his wife Nancy’s breast cancer. Doing so had raised public awareness and moved others to arrange for testing.

Similarly he hoped to promote public awareness of Alzheimer’s and to increase understanding of this disease on the part of those individuals and families affected by it.

With characteristic optimism the former president then indicated his plans for the future – sharing his life with Nancy and other family members, enjoying  the outdoors, and staying in contact with friends and supporters.

However, he also acknowledged that Alzheimer’s would impose a heavy burden on his family. He especially regretted the effect it would have on his wife. “I only wish there was some way I could spare Nancy from this painful experience,” he wrote in his most moving sentence.

Toward the end of his letter Ronald Reagan indicated both a faith in God and great love for his country along with “eternal optimism for its future.”

The next ten years leading up to his death this month were largely hidden from the public. His wife shielded him from all but family members and their closest friends. Of course, she supervised his care, a program that in the latter stage included confinement to bed and around-the-clock nursing.

Patti Davis, the former president’s daughter, has written a brief article for Time Magazine in which she gives a few more details of her father’s life as of a few months before his death.

Most of the time he was asleep. By that stage, he no longer recognized anyone. To disguise this fact, says Davis, would be to do a disservice to the public. Seeing someone in this situation “rearranges your universe,” she writes, and “it strips away everything but the most important truth: that the soul is alive, even if the mind is faltering.”

The house was peopled largely by women then, the caregivers and Reagan’s wife and daughter. When his sons came to visit, their father seems to have become aware of their presence, but even that is uncertain.

Davis characterizes Alzheimer’s as a long series of “I-don’t-knows.” For her, the time after her father dies will bring many silences and some emptiness. But she believes that the most important things in which her father believed will remain – “echoes, whispers, all those things don’t vanish when a person dies.”

My own reflections on the experience begin with the fact that, as a former president, Ronald Reagan was assured good health care. Unlike so many other Americans, he did not have to worry about what would happen to him in the face of crippling disease. Would that Americans of all ages and conditions shared that security!

Another reflection is inspired by Nancy Reagan, who said, at one point “Ronnie’s long journey has taken him to a distant place.” These poignant words express well the experience of those who come to know the fading of a loved one as the disease progresses to its final stages.

Mrs. Reagan must have gone through what a religious sister who works with Alzheimer sufferers has described: “You want to sit and cry. You know where it’s going and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”

But her experience has enabled her to become an advocate for research that will lead someday to a solution. She has pressed for more money devoted to this effort and has argued for the controversial use of stem cells from human embryos for this purpose.

However painful the Alzheimer’s diagnosis may have been, the letter bears witness to Ronald Reagan having been told the truth about his disease early on. His family did not yield to the temptation of shielding him from the facts. That speaks well for them in a situation of growing anguish.

The love with which members of the family treated Reagan is thoroughly admirable. I would add an old fashioned word to describe their devotion to him – reverence. Though they saw his growing deterioration in body and mind, they kept in focus that he remained a human person, deserving of respect and honor.

Both the letter from the father and the article written by the daughter give testimony to a spirituality that impresses me as an indispensable response to Alzheimer’s disease. Though I myself find Davis’s spirituality too vague for comfort, and I take issue with her father’s optimism, I feel glad that they could find some deeper meaning in the trial that the disease brought.

Richard Griffin