I have to confess I watched some of Ronald Reagan’s funeral Friday night. First, I’m still not ready to see the Terminator sit beside Margaret Thatcher. Now I should have learned from Mr. Reagan that actors can be good enough politicians but the difference there is that I never knew Mr. Reagan as an actor. I only knew about that backwards. For me, he was a president first. I suffer a similar anachronism which leads me to believe that Liza Minelli is the mother or Judy Garland.

A nation, more than a nation, I think, waited a week to see Nancy Reagan break down. I think the community soul, the community heart, was waiting to see her crack up. And the community was ready for the moment. In the silence of the sunset all you could hear was the clicking and whirring of a thousand cameras. At least it seemed like a thousand cameras. Only cannon fire was enough to block out the sound of the Canons.

No photograph was as much demanded this past Saturday morning as the broken heart of Nancy Reagan. But still, if I had been there, I don’t think I could take that picture. I think there is private grief and public grief and I think that western funerals are very much about public grief. But I’m not sure grief has ever been as public as the Reagan funeral. As much as I love a photograph, I wanted all the men to turn the cameras off. I know that would have meant that millions of mourning Americans couldn’t watch but that’s alright. I didn’t want to see. I didn’t want people to see.

Something else. I thought, nay, I nearly wanted Nancy to die in her sleep by Saturday morning. That might sound cruel. But I know a Greek tragedy when I, well, when I make one up. The death of Ronald Reagan was about many things but about nothing so much as the perfect love of Ronald and Nancy and from everything I know I believe in that love. But she has spent the last 10 years or more caring for a man who for the most part wasn’t the man she loved and, as far as I understand, stopped recognizing her. When you go to tend a tree everyday, in rain and snow and the glare of sunny midday, what do you do the day after the tree has been struck down?

For 10 years she was charged with taking care of this man. For something like 6 days she was charged with, well, a very public mourning. And if I can avoid the moral dilemma of worrying about her as a person, I think it should have been very beautiful if she had died peacefully over this past weekend.

At the funeral there was much talk about God’s time. Saturday morning, God didn’t call for Nancy. But if he were a poet or a follower of beautiful tragedy, he would have. Still, it’s probably lucky for her that he isn’t.

SS