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"It explains first of all the tremendous sadness with which people are reacting to news of his passing. Normally, when a 93-year-old Alzheimer's victim who ceased being himself years ago dies, the immediate reaction is relief that he has finally gone on to his just reward. With Reagan there's some of that, yes, but it hardly begins to mitigate the overriding hurt. Perhaps collectively there's a sense of guilt that no one could do much of anything to help him over the last decade. A great amount of pent-up emotion is being released. Everyone knows he deserved so much better (though thank God for his wife), and that he's the last man who would have ever settled for helplessness."

My family is complicated. My father died when I was 7 and my brother not yet 2, and my mother remarried an older man with three daughters, all older than I. One, who was mentally handicapped, lived with us, her twin usually lived with her mother, and the oldest one, Margie, was on her own, but visited frequently until her marriage. She was close to her father, but did not have a lot of contact with the rest of us, even after my stepfather adopted my brother and me and mother produced a new sister for all of us.

Margie was an enigma. Very capable at everything she chose to do, but she was impatient, easily bored, and did not stick with anything for long. After she married and moved away, we did not see much of her until she divorced and came back to California. Even then, she seldom visited.

But years later, after her father died, and when my mother was in her final bout with cancer, Margie moved in with her. Margie was then a LPN (nurse), going to school to become a registered nurse, and she was able to give Mother the loving care that she needed. Insulin and other shots, foot and back massages, one to help her diabetes and the other for her comfort, care for her colostomy, a messy and unpleasant task, and all of the cooking, cleaning, shopping, and everything else.

My brother and younger sister were still in a drug-induced stupor in those years, and I had my own family to care for and support, so all I could contribute was some money. Margie was a rock in troubled times, and I sit here right now with tears of gratitude in my eyes.

Margie is now 81, still restless and easily bored, and slips back and forth between retirement and various part-time jobs. But the job she saw through to the end was to comfort and care for a stepmother she barely knew, and earned the gratitude of a distant brother.