'The Long Goodbye' to an Alzheimer's Patient

The Long Goodbye. Patti Davis. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2004. 199 pages. No index. 2 photographs. ISBN: 0679450920. Available from Amazon.com for $13.60.

There are a few diseases that destroy the body but leave the mind intact - Lou Gehrig's disease, and MS. These diseases put their victim in one particular kind of hell. And then there's Alzheimer's disease, which destroys the mind as well. Suffering from Alzheimer's is not like suffering from amnesia...the memory disappears and is replaced by nothing. The victim suffers another kind of hell, as do his or her loved ones.

Patti Davis, daughter of Ronald Reagan, tells a bit...only a bit... of what it's like in her memoir The Long Goodbye.

Ronald Reagan, born in 1911, went to Hollywood in 1937 and became a contract player for Warner Brothers. He landed lead roles in what were considered 'B' pictures, but rarely made it to the 'A's', and then only in supporting roles. After a stint in the Army Air Corps during World War II, Reagan returned to movies, and also plied his craft in the new medium of television.

He was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild in 1947. He moved into politics and supported Barry Goldwater for president in 1964. In 1966 he was elected governor of California - and served for 8 years. He tried for the presidency in 1976, but lost the Republican Party's nomination to Gerald Ford. He was more successful in 1980. At 69, he was the oldest man to be elected president. He served two terms.

In November 1994, at the age of 83, Reagan announced that he had Alzheimer's disease. He died ten years later, on June 5, 2004, at the age of 93.

Patti Davis, Reagan's daughter by his second wife, Nancy Davis, had a rocky relationship with her parents. She was a peace activist and disagreed with her father's policies...and also grew estranged from her mother.

In The Long Goodbye, she tells of how her father's illness brought her "splintered family" back together again. It's well written and moving...but it covers only two years, from April, 1995 to February 1997. At the end of that time she put the manuscript away. Her father existed for seven more years. After he died, Davis brought the manuscript out again. She does not mention the intervening years and what they must have been like, but jumps ahead and covers in a few pages only the last three days of his life, from June 3 - 5, 2004.

So this book succeeds on one level, but fails on another. Davis describes in beautiful prose her rapprochement with her parents, her dealings with her grief during the two years following his announcement, when they didn't expect her father to last much longer...and is a wonderful exploration of a daughter's maturation and understanding of her past and present.

But what of the missing seven years? What was it like to minister to a father who didn't exist anymore, except in body? To have to minister to his every want as to a child? The story would perhaps not have been as representative as most, for the Reagan's could have afforded the absolute best treatment and care, while most Alzheimer's sufferers do not have that luxury. Nevertheless many readers, who hoped to see their own experiences in caring for their own loved ones mirrored here...or what to expect, for those who have to care for newly diagnosed family members, will be disappointed.