‘I’m not afraid to die, I’ll see Ronnie again’: Patti Davis reveals what mother Nancy Reagan said before she passed away in moving tribute describing how they ‘reached peace’ after years of feuding. Patti Davis has paid tribute to her mother Nancy Reagan and described how they reached ‘peace’ after years of difficulties in their relationship.
The former First Lady passed away on Sunday at the age of 94 and is currently lying in repose ahead of her funeral in California on Friday. As the nation remembers the influential former actress, Davis told Today that her mother was not afraid to die as she looked forward to being reunited with her husband President Ronald Reagan, who died in 2004 after 10 years battling Alzheimer’s disease. ‘She told me once that she was not afraid to die, she said ‘I don’t want it to hurt but I’m not afraid to die, I’ll see Ronnie again’,’ she remembered in an interview with Maria Shriver on Thursday.
‘I think she would be very honored and very happy that people paused in their lives to pay their respects to her and to honor her and it’s really comforting to see all these people who are, I’m sure, not all Republicans standing out on freeway overpasses,’ she continued. ‘America lost a former First Lady but I lost my mother and I’m happy that she’s with my father now.’ She added: ‘They were complete unto each other.’
‘If a band of gypsies were to take me and my brother away, they would miss us but they would be fine,’ she laughed, clarifying: ‘It didn’t mean they didn’t love us. But it meant that they were completely, their lives wouldn’t be destroyed if we weren’t there.
‘They were complete unto each other. That can be a complicated thing for children. Where I came to in my life and with her was to be really happy for her that she had this great love in her life.’ The frictions in Davis’s relationship with her mother were highly public. It led to Davis posing on the cover of Playboy magazine and writing a blistering attack on her parents in a set of memoirs, Home Front.
However, the 63-year-old explained, when Ronald Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 1994, they entered a new phase in their relationship. ‘I feel very complete in my relationship with her, I feel very clear and clean in where our relationship came to, particularly the last few years of her life,’ she told Maria Shriver. ‘At some point, and really it was at the beginning of my father’s illness, I made a choice. I chose to aim for peace of mind and peace in and of itself with my mother. ‘Past incriminations, anger, blame, all of our strained history together, there’s no peace of mind in that at all.
‘I really made a decision to look at her and look at us through a different lens, through a more loving forgiving lens. that doesn’t mean that it was a smooth journey, it was not, there were a lot of peaks and valleys in there and a lot of deep valleys.
‘My mother was not someone who would have been comfortable with an analytical conversation about, “let’s talk about the past, let’s work through this”. It’s a different generation and I think that needs to be respected. I think the better route is to just behave differently.’
Reflecting on her scandalous outbursts, which made headline news, Davis said she regrets attacking her parents in such a public way. ‘I get now why I behaved the way did and why I acted out the way I did and wrote things that I wish I could remove from the face of the earth but I can’t.