She found that the one of the best ways to cope with the stresses of being a caretaker was to find others in a similar situation. Looking back on her own experience of that last decade of her dad's life, Davis admits the journey was a lonely one. Reagan died 12 years later, in 2016 at the age of 94. RELATED: Behind 'the Collateral Heartbreak' and Intense Devotion of the Reagans' Decades-Long Romance As Davis writes in her book, he took his final breath while staring into his wife's eyes and closing his own one last time. In 2004 - 10 years after announcing his diagnosis to the world - Ronald Reagan died at age 93 in Bel Air, California, of complications from Alzheimer's. She could have had that, but nobody knows how to do it and she doesn't know how to ask for that or foster that now.' " "It's not that we didn't want to be there, but nobody knew how."ĭavis continues: "I turned a corner to thinking, 'How sad for her. She created this family that was pretty broken, and now she was losing the love of her life," Davis says. "Finally, instead of feeling resentful, I felt sympathy for her. More challenging, she says, was applying those lessons to her mother. "It was kind of fascinating to see shadows of that near-sighted boy with an alcoholic father who was very alone from a very young age and learned to create his own world."Įven in total silence - watching the way Reagan's eyes lit up when he saw an old photo, or the way his hands would move up and down, clutching an invisible object while he sat in his favorite chair (a surefire sign, says his daughter, that the avid equestrian was holding the reigns of a horse in his mind) - Davis learned more about her father as the disease took its toll. "There so much else in the way - my wanting him to be a more available, present father got in the way of really appreciating and being grateful for the human being he was underneath everything," she says now. But knowing that the end was on the horizon meant that she was able to appreciate him without any hang-ups. ![]() That was his instinct - I have to wipe this up so no one else has to."ĭavis says she knew her father's true temperament well before his Alzheimer's diagnosis. "He thought something had spilled something on the floor and he tried to wipe it up. "My father at his essence was a sweet, gentle person," she says, recounting a day sunlight streamed through the window of his California ranch and onto the floor. Hulton Archive/Getty From left: Ronald Reagan, Patti Davis, Ronald Reagan, Nancy ReaganĪs the former president, a towering man in both stature and presence, grew smaller, Davis says he became "stripped away, to the essence of himself." "If you're willing to follow them down that road, you learn things you might never have learned otherwise." "Alzheimer's moves a person back through time," she writes. While she learned to better communicate with her mom, Davis also learned to see her dad in a new light, writing that the disease enabled her to know him "a bit better" as he retreated into an almost child-like version of himself. And that's where the area of change has to be." That's the voice that trails you for all those years. "Ultimately, what's most important is that you believed them. "Here's the thing that I came to: Ultimately, the most important thing is not that the parent belittled you, or made you feel worthless, or deserving of punishment," she says. Speaking to PEOPLE, Davis says she learned an important lesson about parent-child relationships while tending to her father in his later years. ![]() RELATED: Patti Davis Opens Up About Difficult Relationship with Mother Nancy Reagan – but Says She's Happy She Is 'with My Father Now' Alzheimer's made me realize that I had to be the one to change." I'd spent so many decades longing for what I was never going to get from my parents. "The dynamics that were once in place don't need to define the future. "As much as Alzheimer's, and the person who has it, comes to dominate your life, it also presents you with an opportunity to free yourself from the domination of the past," Davis writes in Floating in the Deep End. Davis being there for her father came with its own set of challenges, though - including working through a fractured ( and well-documented) relationship with her mother, former First Lady Nancy Reagan, who was the president's chief defender and most ardent supporter.ĭavis says the changes in her father's health provided an opportunity to get to know her mother in a different way and to define the relationship in her own terms.
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