3 days of mourning for former first lady Nancy Reagan begin
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LOS ANGELES (AP) — Three days of formal mourning for former first lady Nancy Reagan began Wednesday with a private service before her casket was taken in a police-escorted motorcade up an empty freeway for a public viewing at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.
Daughter Patti Davis, dressed in black, greeted about 20 family members and close friends upon arrival at a Santa Monica mortuary where a 20-minute service was presided over by the Rev. Stuart Kenworth.
Attendees included the children of Ronald Reagan’s son Michael and Dennis Revell, the widower of the former president’s late daughter Maureen.
Nancy Reagan’s casket was then carried by pallbearers that included members of her Secret Service detail to a hearse to begin her final journey, a 45-mile drive to the hill country of Simi Valley northwest of Los Angeles where two days of public viewing will precede the funeral.
Los Angeles firefighters raised a large flag from a freeway overpass as the hearse passed by.
Several hundred onlookers stretched along the boulevard leading away from the Tudor-style funeral home in Santa Monica, holding up cellphones and cameras to capture photos of the moments.
The procession included a lengthy stretch of the Ronald Reagan Freeway, a state route named in her husband’s honor in the 1990s.
Friday will be the funeral — which was planned down to the smallest details by the former first lady herself. Just as she was always by his side in life, Nancy Reagan will be laid to rest just inches from her husband on a hillside tomb facing west toward the Pacific Ocean.
Before her death she planned the funeral’s flower arrangements, the music to be played by a Marine Corps band and the people who received invitations to the private memorial.
Among those who had RSVP’d for the service were former President George W. Bush and his wife, former first lady Laura Bush; former first lady Rosalynn Carter; first lady Michelle Obama; and former first lady Hillary Clinton.
