Reagan’s obituary in The New York Times made Em miss the Gallows Lounge; she said his death deserved a political comedy club. The obit was laden with Reagan’s backstory; Em and I took turns reading it aloud to each other. Em began, but she got bogged down in Reagan’s radio career. It made Em cry to imagine we might have had a president who cared about the AIDS victims, if Reagan had stayed in the broadcasting business. It was my turn to read, Em said. She’d gagged on a phrase in one of the opening paragraphs—a line about Reagan’s promising America “a return to greatness.” Nora said Americans were obsessed with their own greatness. Many American politicians ended their speeches by telling us how great we were—the ideologues always assured us we could be great again.

I read aloud for a long time; it seemed to me I was reading forever, but I only got as far as the Republican National Convention in Detroit, where Reagan was first nominated for president. I told Em it was her turn to read when she was swearing over Reagan’s acceptance speech. It was 1980, when Reagan exhorted us to “recapture our destiny.” Nora would have said that destiny was just a bullshit synonym for greatness. At that point, we weren’t even halfway through the undying obit. Em was getting angry, all over again; she was shouting her way through Reagan’s opposition to government financing of abortions for poor women, and his pushing for a constitutional amendment to prohibit abortion. There was more heavy breathing when Em read about Reagan’s call for “a return of God to the classroom”—this meant bringing back prayer in schools. And Reagan was against limitations on buying and owning guns. As tedious as it was to read Reagan’s obituary, Em and I were reminded of the reasons we’d disliked him; we thought the Times had left no stone unturned. The four short paragraphs about the botched assassination attempt were enough; after all, not much had come of it. We tolerated how much there was about “Reaganomics,” considering it was just another name for the standard Republican policy of lowering taxes on the rich. Em didn’t make it past the start of President Reagan’s second term, when the Gipper said the nation was “poised for greatness.” I knew Em—she’d had it with America’s greatness. I knew I would be the reader for all the rest. I was dreading the Iran-Contra scandal, and the back and forth with Gorbachev; I had to get through Reagan’s speech at the Brandenburg Gate, the Berlin Wall business. Em made more coffee and tea; we needed caffeine to make it to the end of the obit.