Ronald Reaganâ€™s daughter writes with a moving openness about losing her father to Alzheimerâ€™s disease. The simplicity with which she reveals the intensity, the rush, the flow of her

The Long Goodbye

Ronald Reaganâ€™s daughter writes with a moving openness about losing her father to Alzheimerâ€™s disease. The simplicity with which she reveals the intensity, the rush, the flow of her feelings encompasses all the surprises and complexities that ambush us when death gradually, unstoppably invades life.

In The Long Goodbye, Patti Davis describes losing her father to Alzheimerâ€™s disease, saying goodbye in stages, helpless against the onslaught of a disease that steals what is most preciousâ€“a personâ€™s memory. â€œAlzheimerâ€™s,â€ she writes, â€œsnips away at the threads, a slow unraveling, a steady retreat; as a witness all you can do is watch, cry, and whisper a soft stream of goodbyes.â€

She writes of needing to be reunited at forty-two with her mother (â€œshe had wept as much as I over our long, embittered warâ€), of regaining what they had spent decades demolishing; a truce was necessary to bring together a splintered family, a few weeks before her father released his letter telling the country and the world of his illness . . .

The author delves into her memories to touch her father again, to hear his voice, to keep alive the years she had with him.

She writes as if past and present were coming together, of her memories as a child, holding her fatherâ€™s hand, and as a young woman whose hand is being given away in marriage by her father . . . of her father teaching her to ride a bicycle, of the moment when he let her go and she went off on her own . . . of his teaching her the difference between a hawk and a buzzard . . . of the family summer vacations at a rented beach houseâ€“each of them tan, her father looking like the athlete he was, with a swimmerâ€™s broad shoulders and lean torso. . . . She writes of how her father never resisted solitude, in fact was born for it, of that strange reserve that made people reach for him. . . . She recalls him sitting at his desk, writing, staring out the window . . . and she writes about the toll of the disease itself, the look in her fatherâ€™s eyes, and her efforts to reel him back to her.

Moving . . . honest . . . an illuminating portrait of grief, of a man, a disease, and a woman and her father.
Country USA
Brand Knopf
Manufacturer Knopf
Binding Hardcover
ReleaseDate 2004-11-16
UnitCount 1
EANs 9780679450924

The Long Goodbye

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Country	USA
Brand	Knopf
Manufacturer	Knopf
Binding	Hardcover
ReleaseDate	2004-11-16
UnitCount	1
EANs	9780679450924