Nancy’s touch led nation in mourning

WASHINGTON – There is a human urge to reach toward the flag-draped casket, but no clear protocol about how to do it. Nancy Reagan’s gentle touch eased the awkwardness, and Americans in T-shirts and dress uniforms drew close to salute and pray and mourn on a scale the nation is unlikely to repeat soon.

In a weeklong remembrance, world leaders patted and stroked Ronald Reagan’s casket and ordinary citizens, held back by velvet-covered ropes, showed their respect with bowed heads, shuffling feet and silence.

At the U.S. Capitol, a visitor in an American flag tie dropped to the floor to do push-ups. A Sioux Indian in feathered headdress came to salute. So did Marine Cpl. James E. Wright, who lost both hands in the Iraq war.

The week’s ceremonies, the most elaborate since President Johnson’s funeral three decades ago, mixed senators in dark suits with children in strollers and teens in flip-flops.

The outpouring for Reagan, who died at 93 after a long illness, was compared to mourning for Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, both assassinated.

“We’re now in the realm of myth,” said Emory University professor Gary Laderman, a historian of death and mourning. “This was about Reagan’s iconic, mythic status in American history, and not many people get to that level.”

The pageantry began Monday morning, as the public lined up to walk past the mahogany casket at Reagan’s presidential library in California.

Mrs. Reagan caressed the flag-covered closed coffin and rested her head against it lovingly, opening the way for dignitaries who would begin arriving from around the world.

“If she had not touched the casket, I assure you no one else would have. She in a way gave people permission,” said David Kessler, director of palliative care at three Los Angeles hospitals and author of “The Needs of the Dying.”

After all, many Americans are nervous about funeral etiquette, unsure how to act around a corpse in an age when death has moved out of the home and into the sanitized realm of hospitals and funeral homes.

Yet, just as in 1865, when Lincoln’s funeral train stopped in 20 cities and Americans lined up to pay respects at the open casket, “the body is what we want to say goodbye to,” Kessler said.

“We need to make the loss as tangible as possible,” he said. “We want to go and see and experience for ourselves.”

So Reagan was flown to Washington, the most fitting setting for dignitaries to pay their respects in person. Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher placed a hand on the closed casket, and Mikhail Gorbachev, who was Reagan’s Soviet rival, gave it a pat. Former Polish leader Lech Walesa knelt to pray.

President Bush stopped at the Capitol briefly Thursday night and ran both hands across the flag atop the casket, as if smoothing out wrinkles. He delivered a eulogy at Friday’s funeral at the Washington National Cathedral.

For Americans who never met the 40th president, the sight of Mrs. Reagan gently kissing her husband’s casket Friday carried both the weight of history and the echoes of their own personal losses.