That second voice, while facile with words, relies more on tone to be the tonic, the palliative. I think the woman who lives there has Alzheimer’s, but I’m not sure. I only know the lit window and the trail of voices.
Anyone whose family has been invaded by disease knows that there is an architecture to illness. It becomes a dependable structure for the lives that dwell there. Someone is always awake at my parents’ house. There is always a lamp on, even in the dead of night. No matter who someone is, or what kind of life they have lived, if illness strikes, it becomes the outline of their existence. It is also sadly and strangely reductive; other things fall away and there is only that–the long days, the lamp-lit nights.
In the case of my father, Ronald Reagan, however, there is a sort of parallel universe. I watch from the sidelines as his image, his legacy, the mark he made on the world with his presidency is cast and recast in the fires of history. It’s an odd alchemy, one that will continue long after he is gone–long after his children are gone.
George W. Bush has been compared often to my father; it seems to be a continuing effort in some circles. Yet it doesn’t stop at comparisons. There seems to be a desire to morph one public figure into another. I imagine journalists and political scholars trying to fit a tracing of President Bush into a tracing of my father, moving the images around, shaving off bits here and there for a good fit. As if the uniqueness of one human being can’t be left on its own–a separate image–to stand as an inspiration for others.
It’s true that there have been some eerie similarities in the two presidencies, as has been pointed out. Most recently, there was the Columbia tragedy sending us back in time to another bright blue morning when the Challenger blew up.
But one individual’s uniqueness is meant to spark in us a longing to find our own–not to imitate or copy, but to reach deep into ourselves for our own authenticity.
There are volumes of photographs of my father. That’s typical of lives lived in the spotlight, and more photographs seem to be discovered all the time. I concentrate now on his eyes–how, even as a young man, there was something that looked beyond, reached farther down the road to a point in the distance. As if he were being pulled along, which was how he saw it. God put us all here for a reason, he used to say. He was committed to finding what that reason was–his own, unique reason, his own authentic path. If people want to understand Ronald Reagan, they need to know this: He never imitated anyone.
Someday there will be no lamp lit window in my parents’ house, burning through the night, unless perhaps it’s my mother, kept awake by the silence. But there will be other windows, lit up by people working late hours, tracing the threads of history, trying to understand those who made such indelible marks–hoping to figure them out, map them out and probably comparing them.
It’s always risky to try and surmise what someone else would say if they could, and I am generally intolerant of those who speculate about what my father would say. But I think I know how he would react to others trying to draw a blueprint of him–a pattern for followers to fit into. He would laugh softly and then suggest that people have to draw their own imprints, one that is theirs alone. Find it, I think he’d say; draw it and never lose sight of it. It’s the best you that you can be.
