I feel sorry for Ronald Reagan.
I’ve read the essay by daughter Patti,
and she touched me as she described
watching her father slowly slip away,
not the body, but the person,
how memory, then speech,
then even personality,
eroded like ebb-tide sand,
till she would look in his eyes
and hardly see her father inside.
It is like a return to the womb,
so many years of learning, experience,
wiped right off the slate.

Old Dutch used to rankle me,
our politics on either side of the scale.
But now, if you say Reaganomics,
Iran-Contra, Evil Empire,
none of it will register.
Even family is only a blur of people.
He looks out the window at the trees,
almost longing, she says,
maybe looking for what he has lost.

I can only imagine what it would be like,
if I came to a similar fate,
my mind bobbing like a cork
in my own sea of flesh.

02/07/2002

Author's Note: [In memoriam, 1911-2004]

Posted on 02/07/2002
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