On Nov. 5, 1994, my father, Ronald Reagan, wrote a letter to America announcing he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He and my mother had decided to share the news, he wrote, because, “In opening our hearts, we hope this might promote greater awareness of this condition. Perhaps it will encourage a clearer understanding of the individuals and families who are affected by it.”
Almost six years after leaving office, no longer the leader of the free world, my father found another path of leadership — sharing the sadness of a diagnosis that is heartbreakingly common, one that often leaves people feeling helpless, terrified and alone, even if they have family members and friends around them. Facing one’s own mortality is a solitary journey, yet seeing through the shadows to an outstretched hand, hearing in that wilderness that there is someone else wrestling with the same emotions, calls forth the tears that want to fall and also the possibility that those tears will dry.
Over the weekend, Joe Biden informed the nation of his diagnosis of prostate cancer. For the former president, it is, of course, a personal matter, but it can also be something else: an opportunity to show leadership, not in the arena of national or global politics, but on a vulnerable, human level.
Alzheimer’s was almost a forbidden subject when my father received his diagnosis. He opened the gates to discussing it, looking at it, trying to understand it. It was a role very different from the one he had known as governor or president.
The disease afflicting Mr. Biden is these days spoken of openly, but the emotional tidal waves that come with it are often not. Millions of people face the trauma and fear of learning that they have cancer. Millions of people struggle with how to talk about it, how to process it, how to get through the endless dark nights when death stands in the doorway and whispers “maybe.”
Mr. Biden’s news comes at a bad time for him politically, amid renewed discussion of the decline he suffered while in office, and of the ways his staff and family insulated him and kept the American people in the dark. That has fueled speculation that he knew about the cancer for far longer than he has divulged. (My father, too, was accused of knowing about his diagnosis while he was in office, years before he disclosed it. For that to have been true, he would have lived with the disease for 20 or so years — not a realistic possibility for someone his age.)
Coming at the end of Mr. Biden’s public service, these issues run the risk of overshadowing his accomplishments. But people’s life stories are complex. Mr. Biden has an opportunity now to add another chapter to his biography and to his legacy. He can do that by lowering his guard, by sharing with us not only what it says on his medical chart but also how it feels to hear it, by talking openly about what it feels like to contemplate the end that comes for us all.
He has no more elections to navigate, and no more focus-grouped calculations to make. After decades of being a politician, he can just be an all-too-mortal human being. And his candor now might go a long way toward restoring trust with voters — even his own supporters — who feel that he was not honest with them about his fitness for a second term.
To be sure, personal revelations are less surprising now than they were in my father’s day. We live in times of great oversharing. Mr. Biden’s openness would be something different, though. It would be a recognition that some experiences transcend partisan politics, ideological debates, bitter judgments. A recognition that as human beings, we are both fragile and strong. And we are more alike than we are different.
For my father, the announcement of his illness was also the announcement of the end of his public life. He still got out, went for walks, attended church, and along the way he encountered a great many people, but his days of making speeches and statements were over. Prostate cancer is very different from Alzheimer’s, however. For Mr. Biden, the announcement of his illness can also be the start of a new relationship with the American people. No doubt some will lean into his vulnerability as an opportunity for attack. I suspect a great many more people, no matter their political orientation, would simply be grateful for his openness.
At the end of my father’s letter, he wrote: “When the Lord calls me home, whenever that may be, I will leave with the greatest love for this country. …” Pushing past the political to the personal, showing us that leadership sometimes comes in small gestures, would be an expression of the love for this country that I believe Mr. Biden has always felt, and a way, perhaps, to soothe a few of the fears that so many of us wrestle with.
Patti Davis is the author of “Dear Mom and Dad: A Letter About Family, Memory and the America We Once Knew” and “Floating in the Deep End: How Caregivers Can See Beyond Alzheimer’s.”
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