In the years following Ronald Reagan’s death, Nancy Reagan missed him so much that she’d regularly leave her TV blaring for hours to fight paralyzing loneliness, their daughter wrote on Thursday.
Patti Davis penned a poignant, warts-and-all tribute to her mom, in a 180-degree turn from the oddly terse statement she issued earlier this week about her passing.
Patti Davis in FebruaryGetty Images“A while after my father died, she told me that she kept the television on all the time because it made her feel less lonely,” Davis wrote in a Time magazine piece. “’It makes the house seem more lived in,’ she said. I had, on several occasions, given in to my annoyance and either turned the volume down or turned it off. I had to practically yell to be heard over whatever program she had on — usually a news station — and sometimes I couldn’t stand it. But after she told me that it filled in some of the loneliness, I never reached for the remote again.”
Davis said she was saddened, knowing TV background noise was her mom’s only solace against “the empty darkness.”
“The thought of her dreading the empty darkness so much that she would leave the TV on made my heart hurt,” according to Davis. “More and more, I hung on to moments like that when thinking about my mother.”
Davis, a liberal activist, and her parents — icons of the modern conservative movement — were estranged for years over their wildly divergent political views.
She and her mom began mending fences after President Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 1994. He died in 2004 at the age of 93.
“I really made a decision to try to look at her and look at us through a different lens, through a more loving, forgiving lens,” Davis told NBC’s “Today” show on Thursday. “That doesn’t mean that it was a smooth journey. It was not. There were still a lot of peaks and valleys in there, and a lot of really deep valleys.”
Nancy and Ronald Reagan were so in love with each other, Davis joked, that their kids were nearly superfluous.
“If a band of gypsies came and took me and Ron away, they would miss us, but they’d be fine. You know, they would go on,” Davis laughed. “Which didn’t mean they didn’t love us. But it meant that they were complete. Their lives wouldn’t be destroyed if we weren’t there. They were complete unto each other. And that can be a complicated thing for children.”
