About Nancy Reagan

So, Nancy Reagan died this weekend. Regardless of how a person feels about Reagan's politics, or Just Say No, or the fancy dresses, or whatever, I think most Gen Xers would say this feels like the end of an era a little bit.

Much is being made (once again) of the fact that she consulted an astrologer, and how that was kind of a scandal and a thing people laughed at. And first off, a disclaimer: I don't believe at all in astrology. I think AT BEST it's an entertaining fraud. I say this despite occasionally joking I'm the stereotypical Piscean (I really am not. Yes, I have the "feelings too sensitive for their own good" trait, but there are other traits I don't have - namely, the artistic-talent one and the "flaky" one. (I am more crusty than I am flaky these days. And anyway, "flakiness" as a personality trait means you're not reliable, and I have been described as "the sort of person who would crawl into Hell 30 feet over broken glass to fulfill an obligation....)

And I remember when that came out in the news. I remember rolling my eyes over that (A First Lady, really? Using an astrologer?) and my friends and I talking about how it was embarrassing for the wife of the Leader Of The Free World (shut up. That's how we referred to it back in those days) to consult an astrologer.

But now that I'm older, and have been through more loss and much more uncertainty than I had experienced at 16 or so, I am more sympathetic. Oh, I still think astrology's bunk. But I look at what she did and I realize: she was scared. I don't know for sure but I suspect she started doing it after her husband (and again, think what you will of Reagan's politics; it's clear she loved him very, very much) nearly died at the hands of a crazed man who allegedly wanted to impress Jodi Foster.*

She was grasping at straws. She was looking for something that felt like control (allegedly, the astrology was used to try to ascertain if the President would be safe going certain places on certain days).

Sadly, right now, I know that "feel." Oh, I don't have a powerful husband that lots of people hated and who might get taken out by an assassin's bullet, but I have other uncertainty in my life and I admit, if I believed at all in astrology, I'd be consulting my horoscope every morning now.

And I get that trusting there's a Grand Plan behind all this is important, and I really do, but I also suspect that Grand Plan is less about what happens here than what happens to us after here....and so here has the risk of becoming pretty bleak, and that's my fear. So I would like something that would give me either a sense of more control over my immediate future, or at least more of a peek at it so I can either relax (if the things I'm worried about don't come to pass) or prepare for the worst (if they do).

I don't know. Maybe this is a little bit of an object lesson in "have a little compassion for the other person" - sixteen-year-old me laughed at the idea of a powerful and allegedly wealthy woman consulting an astrologer; forty-seven-year-old me understands why she did and understands some of the fears that led her to do that.


(*Perhaps the world has not grown stranger, despite my feeling that it has. Perhaps it's always been strange and somewhat incomprehensible)