The Triumph of Nancy Reagan by Karen Tumulty (short books for teens txt) 📕

slightly different spot, as if it had been pushed aside when someone left. “She could not, she said, explain this,” recalled Peggy Noonan, to whom Nancy recounted the story. “Whatever it was, love, she felt, did not just disappear.” Nancy also started wondering more about the afterlife, and whether she and Ronnie would once again be together there. Evangelist Billy Graham assured her they would.

Finally, there came a time when it was clear that this reunion would not be far away. She had planned nearly every detail of her funeral but for one: a minister to deliver her eulogy. Nancy hadn’t particularly liked the job done by the clergyman who handled Ronnie’s service at the Reagan Library, and the others to whom she felt closer were infirm or already dead themselves. Her friend Robert Higdon approached Episcopal priest Stuart Kenworthy, who had recently retired as rector of Christ Church in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington. This was the most personal of assignments, and Kenworthy had never met Nancy. So, some time around early 2015, he flew to Los Angeles for what amounted to a highly unconventional audition. When Kenworthy arrived at the house in Bel Air, Higdon and Peggy Noonan took him back to Nancy’s tidy, light-filled bedroom. She was dressed in casual clothes and was lying on top of her bed. Kenworthy spotted a walker in the corner and a large amount of medication, signs of her precarious health. But mostly, he noticed that even as Nancy was reaching the end of her life, “she had a quiet elegance about her. Hair was done. All those things.”

Kenworthy didn’t say much, as the three others shared old yarns from their years in the White House. The next day, Kenworthy and Higdon returned to see Nancy again. The clergyman, feeling a little more at ease, picked up some of the photographs that jammed the top of Nancy’s nightstand and asked her to tell him the stories behind them. One was worn and creased and a little too big for its weathered Plexiglas holder. It was a snapshot of Ronnie, taken in profile, when he was deep in the throes of Alzheimer’s. He was lying down, just as Nancy was then. In the photo, she was hovering above him, their two faces nose to nose. The intimacy was still there, even through the fog of his illness.

Nancy held it for a few moments and then told Kenworthy: “This one is my favorite.”

“Mrs. Reagan, when I see this, I see someone living out their marriage vows,” he said.

“Yes,” Nancy agreed, “it is.”

She put it back on its spot, closest to her on the table. Kenworthy then asked Higdon if he might be left alone with Nancy. He sat in a chair at her bedside, and the two of them talked. She spoke of Ronnie, how much she loved him and how badly she wanted to be with him again. Kenworthy told her that with death, our existence is changed, not ended. Then Kenworthy asked Nancy if they might pray together. They offered thanksgiving—for life, and for love. They prayed that God would be with her in all that lay ahead. As Kenworthy left, he told her: “Mrs. Reagan, I’d like to come back and see you again some time.” That would be nice, she said. Both of them knew it was not likely to happen.

The end for Nancy came on March 6, 2016, a Sunday. She was ninety-four. In her final week, the doctors could see it coming, though they weren’t sure exactly how long she had. Nancy was lucid until the very last. Patti and Ron came to visit several times. Three days before she died, Doug Wick and his wife, Lucy Fisher, spent time at her bedside. She seemed “a little at sea,” he said, so he picked up a nearby book. It was a volume of Ronnie’s letters to her, which Nancy had published more than a dozen years earlier. Wick asked if he could read a few of them to her. She perked up and told him playfully: “Well, I may have four or five minutes.” Wick read to her until he began to worry that he was tiring her out. But every time he got ready to close the book, she would ask to hear just one more: “I could just feel how it comforted her. It grounded her, anchored her.”

One of her final visitors was Dennis Revell, Maureen’s widower. He and his fiancée, Cyndi Klement, made the seven-hour drive from Sacramento on Saturday. Nancy was fond of Cyndi’s cookies. They brought her a batch of her favorite kind, and Nancy shared it with her nurses. Dennis’s thirteen-year-old Ford Expedition had started blowing steam and smoke as he had turned onto Nancy’s driveway. She nagged him to take care of his radiator before he and Cyndi headed back. “It’s Saturday,” she worried. “How are you going to get your car repaired?”

Early the next morning, her nurses discovered that Nancy had died in her sleep. The cause was congestive heart failure. Kenworthy got word of her death from Higdon. By then, the Episcopal priest had been named interim vicar at the National Cathedral in Washington. Though it had been nearly a year and a half since his meeting with Nancy, he had nothing prepared for a eulogy. He couldn’t find the right words.

“I had all these books. I had about three or four books on the Reagans and Mrs. Reagan, the Reagan years. In the final analysis, they weren’t what I was looking for. I sat at my desk and pulled out the Scriptures, and I just sat there and prayed: ‘Lord, give me some light here,’ ” he said. Kenworthy worked for two hours, but it still didn’t feel quite right. Then he remembered the photo that Nancy kept by her bed, and realized that was it. That is what he would talk about. That was the image that brought love and faith together. “I’ve made a life and