Lessons My Father Taught Me

by Michael Reagan

  And the next vision he beheld was the face of his Lord.

  There are many passages of Scripture I could cite to characterize his life and his faith in God. But I can think of no more appropriate verse than the words of the apostle Paul, written near the end of his life to his spiritual son Timothy, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day—and not only to me, but also to all who have longed for his appearing.”5

  Most of the lessons my father taught me were about how to live my life—how to live with faith in God and with love for my fellow human beings. But he left me one last lesson, and when the day comes, I hope and pray that I have learned it well.

  He taught me how to die.

  A Close Encounter

  I was midway through the writing of this book when everything nearly came to a screeching halt. It was Sunday, October 11, 2015. Colleen and Ashley had run in the Long Beach Marathon. After the run, I took my wife and daughter home, then I went out to pick up our dogs and bring them back to the house.

  I picked up the dogs without incident and was on my way home. Colleen called me on my cell phone and said, “Michael, I just wanted to make sure you’re OK. You didn’t look well when you left, and I was concerned about you.”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I’ll be home soon.” We chatted for a few moments.

  Then it hit me—hard. I felt I had to throw up. I pulled over, got out of the car, and leaned over—but I couldn’t throw up. I had heard that nausea and dry heaves were often a sign of a heart attack. That scared me. I still had Colleen on the phone, and I told her what was happening to me.

  “Michael,” she said, “where are you? Ashley and I will come get you.”

  I knew where I was—but I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t name the cross streets. There were street signs nearby—but I couldn’t read them.

  At that moment, I knew it wasn’t a heart attack. I was having a stroke.

  I got back in the car and started driving. I was about four miles from our house. I kept my phone on and kept talking to Colleen. Meanwhile, Colleen told Ashley to call the paramedics, then they each took a car and went looking for me.

  Colleen and I continued talking, though I don’t remember anything I said or how I got home. I remember driving down one street and realizing I had just passed my front gate. I told Colleen I was at our house. Then I backed up, opened the gate, and parked the car perfectly. Moments later, Colleen pulled in behind me. She helped me out of the car and sat me down in the garage.

  Minutes later the ambulance pulled in, followed by Ashley. The paramedics bundled me into the ambulance and rushed me to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Burbank. There I was evaluated and they told me I had suffered a mild stroke. The doctors wanted to keep me overnight for observation. They thought I’d be able to go home the following day.

  But at 11:30 the next morning, I had a seizure and another stroke. My heart went into atrial fibrillation and flutter, and the doctors used the paddles on me three times to get my heart back into its rhythm. They then put me into an induced coma for two days.

  When I came out of the coma, I had visitors—my dear friends Bob Neal; Bob Scullin; their wives; and my birth brother, Barry Lang, with his wife, Sandy. I had first met Barry in 1987 during my search for my birth mother. At one time, he was a writer for the sitcoms Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley, but he had left California because of the drugs and corrosive culture of Hollywood. Barry now runs Waterbeds ‘n’ Stuff in Columbus, Ohio. He had flown out to be with me after Colleen told him about my stroke.

  A woman came in who introduced herself as a therapist who worked with stroke patients. She would show me different shapes—squares, circles, triangles—but I couldn’t tell her what they were. I could speak, and I had no paralysis, but I couldn’t recognize words or shapes.

  As Barry and I visited, I remembered something he had told me soon after we met in 1987. He had come out to California before my first book came out, and he said to me before he left town, “Just to let you know, because of our family genetics, you will either die before you’re sixty-nine, or you’ll live to be in your nineties. It all depends on which kind of heart you got.”

  In fact, Barry needed a quadruple bypass at age forty-three and has had eleven stents put in since then, though he is otherwise in great physical shape. After Barry told me about my genetic history, I talked to my doctor, and he put me on low-dose Bayer aspirin. I’ve gone to the doctor every year, gotten regular checkups, and I’ve done everything my doctor told me to. I go to the gym three or four days a week, my resting heart rate is 41, and my doctor tells me I have the heart of an athlete.

  My doctor said, “This stroke is ultimately the result of your genetics, not your lifestyle.” When the doctors did an angiogram, they found that the blood vessels going to my heart were more than 90 percent clogged. I needed a quadruple bypass.

  They scheduled the surgery for November 2. As the anesthesiologist was preparing to put me under, the surgeon said, “Do you have anything to say before we begin?”

  Any last words? I hadn’t expected that question. I realized that this was as close to death as I was likely to get and still live through it—if I lived through it. I didn’t know if I would survive open-heart surgery. The odds were good—but the reality is that not everyone makes it.

  I looked at the surgeon and said, “When I wake up, I want to see my wife and family—not my parents.”

  The anesthesiologist and the surgeon both chuckled—then they proceeded to put me under. I found out later that, after the surgery was completed successfully, the surgeon went out and told Colleen, Cameron, and Ashley what I had said.

  The surgery went well, but afterward my heart refused to beat properly on its own. So three days later, the doctors installed a pacemaker.

  I stayed in the hospital from October 11 to November 9—twenty-nine days—and I had the greatest doctors and nurses on the planet. During my stay, Bob and Cathy Scullin came to the hospital on Thursdays and Sundays to read Scripture and serve me Communion.

  My cognitive therapist thought she would need to work with me for about a year. But after three months, she said I was functioning well. I could read (though not as easily as before the stroke, due to a blind spot in the upper right corner of my vision), and my cognitive abilities were back to normal.

  We told very few people that I’d had a stroke. Because of the work I do, I didn’t want to give anyone the impression that I was incapacitated and couldn’t do my job.

  I feel extremely blessed. I had suffered two strokes and a seizure, but I had no paralysis, my speech was not affected, and within a short time I was back at work, giving speeches and working on this book. I wasn’t able to drive for a while, but that was a minor inconvenience.

  In the midst of the writing of this book, I had a close encounter with death. I didn’t want to die—but if death came, I was ready. I didn’t want to leave my family—but I knew I would see them again.

  I was afraid when the stroke first hit me and I didn’t know if I could find my way home. I was afraid when they were about to put me under and open my chest. Though I fear the process of dying, I’m not terrified of death itself. When the time comes, my faith in God will carry me through the doorway of eternity.

  That, too, is one of the lessons my father taught me.

  Epilogue

  A Lesson Dad and I Taught Each Other

  MY SISTER MAUREEN WAS one of the most selfless people I’ve ever known.

  After Dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, Maureen organized fund-raisers, gave media interviews, testified before Congress—anything to find a cure for the disease. Her only thought was for Dad and all the other people suffering from the disease.

  She was so wrapped up in the cause that she neglected her own health needs. After skipping checkups and ignoring the warning signs, she was dia
gnosed with advanced melanoma. Even after she knew her illness was terminal, she never thought about herself. She only thought about Dad, about Mom, about her husband and daughter, about me. Maureen was a mother hen, and she was watching over everyone but herself.

  In December 2000, Colleen and I went to visit Maureen at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. She was receiving biochemotherapy treatments at the John Wayne Cancer Institute there. When we arrived, we visited awhile with Maureen, her husband Dennis, and her daughter Rita. Finally, Maureen said, “Everybody out! No, not you, Michael. You stay.”

  When it was just the two of us, she said, “I know how busy you are, Michael. You’ve got your radio show, your writing, and your speaking—but I want you to do something for me. I’ve been hoping and praying I would beat this cancer. But if I don’t make it, I want you to promise me something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Promise you’ll carry on the work I’m doing. Promise you’ll leave radio, and you’ll devote yourself to preserving our father’s legacy.”

  “I promise.”

  Eight months after that conversation, on August 8, 2001, my sister stepped into eternity.

  Her funeral mass was a beautiful celebration of her life and an expression of her faith. Ron, Patti, and I took part in the service. Though I was only supposed to give a Scripture reading, I departed from the script and talked about Maureen and all she had meant to me over the years. I said a heartfelt “thank you” to her for breaking open her piggy bank and giving her savings to the nurse—all ninety-seven cents of it. Maureen brought me into the Reagan family, and I’ll always be grateful.

  I wasn’t sure if it was okay to go off script like that. But Mom hugged me and thanked me for sharing that personal story of Maureen, and I knew I had done the right thing.

  After Maureen’s death, I took up the causes that she had championed. I joined the board of the John Douglas French Alzheimer’s Foundation (jdfaf.org), which does an outstanding job of funding Alzheimer’s research. My father’s longtime friend Art Linkletter served as chairman of the board for more than twenty years; after he passed away in 2010, I was named honorary chairman of the foundation.

  I was elected to the Board of Trustees of Eureka College in 2006—another cause that was dear to Maureen’s heart. She was elected to the board in 1999 but passed away before she could complete her term.

  To fulfill my promise of maintaining my father’s legacy, I founded the Reagan Legacy Foundation (reaganlegacyfoundation.org). Among the foundation’s projects are the Ronald Reagan exhibit at the Checkpoint Charlie Museum in Berlin; funding for the Ronald Reagan French-American Conference Center at the Normandy Museum in Sainte-Mère-Église (the first town liberated by the Americans on D-Day); and a student exchange program, Liberty Education Tours, which introduces future leaders to the accomplishments and ideas of President Reagan.

  My favorite project of the foundation is the educational scholarship program for personnel who serve aboard the USS Ronald Reagan. Because of my father’s illness, he never got to see the aircraft carrier named for him. The USS Ronald Reagan is the flagship of Carrier Strike Group Five—and on March 15, 2016, I will visit the ship at its home port in Yokosuka, Japan, to hand out more Reagan Legacy Foundation scholarships to deserving sailors, airmen, and their families.

  We also obtained permission from the government of Berlin to place a plaque in the ground at the Brandenburg Gate, commemorating my father’s “Tear Down This Wall” speech in 1987.

  I work with the Young America’s Foundation (YAF), the organization that maintains my father’s ranch, his “cathedral in the sky.” I often speak at YAF events. The Young America’s Foundation is doing an excellent job, inspiring the next generation of Reagan conservatives and upholding the values and principles my father fought for.

  As I have traveled the world, in country after country, people tell me, “Please tell the American people to get it right. The world cannot afford for America to fail.” As my father so often reminded us, America is that “shining city on a hill.” Oppressed people around the world look to America as a place of refuge and hope. We have to keep the lights burning in this shining city. We mustn’t let its light go dark.

  A Time for Choosing

  My father launched his political career with a televised speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater on October 27, 1964. That speech was called “A Time for Choosing.” In that speech, my father laid out the essential principles of what we now know as Reagan conservatism: limited government, lower taxes, free market economics, the inalienable rights of the individual, and the preservation of the Constitution. It was more than a speech about conservative principles—it was a speech about American principles. He said:

  You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a left or right. Well I’d like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There’s only an up or down—up to man’s age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order—or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course. . . .

  The Founding Fathers knew a government can’t control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. They also knew, those Founding Fathers, that outside of its legitimate functions, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector of the economy.

  So we have come to a time for choosing.

  Though Barry Goldwater lost in a landslide, that speech had a profound impact on the nation. Soon afterward, GOP leaders and average citizens were urging Ronald Reagan to run for governor of California. And the rest is history.

  One of the last official acts of Dad’s career was his speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston, Texas. These two speeches—“A Time for Choosing” in 1964 and the convention speech in 1992—are like bookends to his political career. In his final great speech, he returned to the grand themes he first proclaimed in 1964 and embodied throughout the Reagan Eighties. He said:

  While I take inspiration from the past, like most Americans, I live for the future. So this evening, for just a few minutes, I hope you will let me talk about a country that is forever young.

  There was a time when empires were defined by land mass, subjugated peoples, and military might. But the United States is unique because we are an empire of ideals. For two hundred years we have been set apart by our faith in the ideals of democracy, of free men and free markets, and of the extraordinary possibilities that lie within seemingly ordinary men and women. We believe that no power of government is as formidable a force for good as the creativity and entrepreneurial drive of the American people. . . .

  We have arrived, as we always do, at the moment of truth—the serious business of selecting a president. Now is the time for choosing.

  He closed that speech on a note of farewell. “My fellow Americans,” he said, “good-bye, and God bless each and every one of you, and God bless this country we love.” It truly was my father’s farewell to the nation. Exactly two years after delivering that speech, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

  In November 1994, he handwrote a letter to the nation, saying, “I have recently been told that I am one of the millions of Americans who will be afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease. . . . I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.”

  That’s my Dad—as optimistic as ever. But will there always be a bright dawn for America? It depends on you and me. It depends on the choices we make, day by day.

  Every day is a time for choosing.

  The Greatest Lesson of All

  After my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, my sister Maureen would visit Dad at the house and work jigsaw puzzles with him. At first, they would work the big 500-pie
ce puzzles. But as his disease progressed, Maureen would bring a 200-piece puzzle, then a 100-piece puzzle, and finally a 50-piece puzzle.

  We would take my son Cameron, who was a teenager, to visit his grandfather. Cameron enjoyed taking books from the shelves of my father’s library and looking at them. He’d sit next to Dad and they would look at the books together. One of Cameron’s favorite books to thumb through with Dad was written in Chinese characters. They would look at the beautiful pictures in the book, then laugh because neither of them could read the writing.

  Ashley, who is five years younger than Cameron, would sometimes have lunch with Dad at his thirty-fourth floor office suite at Fox Plaza in Century City. At Christmastime in 1995, Colleen and I took Ashley to the office and we had a wonderful lunch with Dad. After lunch, some of Dad’s staffers announced that they had put together a program of Christmas music in the conference room.

  It was about a year and a half after my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and by that time he was having some good moments and some bad moments. For most of our time together, Dad seemed much like his old self. But after lunch, the Alzheimer’s seemed to really kick in. Colleen and I decided we would not stay for the Christmas program, so we hugged Dad good-bye. At that moment, he really couldn’t communicate with us except with a hug.

  Then Dad looked at twelve-year-old Ashley and it was as if everything came into focus for him and he was his old self again—he truly seemed as if he had never had Alzheimer’s a day in his life. “Ashley,” he said, “would you like to join me and listen to some Christmas carols?”