Going home: A sunset burial in California after D.C. service

SIMI VALLEY, Calif. — Ronald Wilson Reagan went to his final rest on a California hilltop Friday in a cinematic finish to a life that took him from a small town in the Midwest, to the glamour of Hollywood, to the role of a lifetime as the nation's 40th president.

As the sun slipped toward the Pacific Ocean, a lone bagpiper played "Amazing Grace" during a burial service at Reagan's presidential library in Simi Valley, Calif., that closed the curtain on six days of remembrance, pageantry and patriotic ritual for a larger-than-life figure whose influence was felt around the globe.

After maintaining her composure in public all week, Nancy Reagan dissolved into tears after receiving the carefully folded flag that had encased her husband's casket. She rested her head on the coffin and cried softly while her children and her stepson, Michael Reagan, tried to comfort her.

During the intensely personal service the Reagan children offered emotional tributes to their father.

"You knew my father as governor and as president, but I knew him as Dad," said Michael Reagan, the former president's adopted son who recalled how his father had raced with him and his brothers and sisters, always making sure that the races ended in a tie.

"I don't know why Alzheimer's was allowed to steal so much of my father before releasing him into the arms of death," daughter Patti Davis, 51, said of Reagan's 10-year struggle with the debilitating ailment. "But I know that at his last moment, when he opened his eyes, eyes that had not opened for many, many days, and looked at my mother, he showed us that neither disease nor death can conquer love."

His son Ron Reagan remembered his father by saying: "He was the most plainly decent man you could ever hope to meet. . . . He always said that a gentleman always does the right thing. But I guess I'm telling you things you already know."

The evening service came hours after another memorial a continent away at the Washington National Cathedral earlier in the day, where world leaders remembered the 40th president as a man of humor, humility and bedrock American values.

"With the lever of American patriotism, he lifted up the world," former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said in a tribute delivered on videotape because of her failing health. "And so today, the world — in Prague, in Budapest, in Warsaw and Sofia, in Bucharest, in Kiev and in Moscow itself — mourns the passing of the great liberator and echoes his prayer: God bless America."