RONALD REAGAN began his long and very public final journey yesterday as his family revealed a sweet poignancy to the former President’s final moments.

Patti Davis, Mr Reagan’s daughter, told how after days of being comatose her father had discovered a final ounce of strength to open his eyes and, with his parting breath, look directly into his wife’s face.

The former First Lady, Nancy Reagan, looked frail and shattered after a days-long bedside vigil as she arrived at Mr Reagan’s presidential library in Simi Valley, 40 miles north of Los Angeles.

Dressed in black and accompanying her husband’s body from a funeral home in Santa Monica, California, to the first in a series of services, 82-year-old Mrs Reagan stared at her lap, expressionless while clutching Ms Davis’s hand throughout a 15-minute proceeding.

Later, she wept gently as she stood alongside Mr Reagan’s flag-draped coffin, touching it as Ms Davis supported her.

Ms Davis revealed earlier this year that her father, crippled by Alzheimer’s disease for ten years, had not been able to recognise Mrs Reagan for a number of years. He could no longer talk, walk or feed himself. Despite having had years to prepare for his departure, Ms Davis said the reality was crushing her mother.

As the 93-year-old Mr Reagan’s health deteriorated sharply last week, the family gathered by his bedside. Ms Davis held her mother as she was “shaking with so much pain you think if you were at the centre of the Earth you could probably feel it”.

But in an article to be published later this week, she wrote: “At the last moment, when his breathing told us this was it, he opened his eyes and looked straight at my mother. Eyes that hadn’t opened for days did, and they weren’t chalky or vague. They were clear and blue and full of love. And they closed with his last breath. If a death can be lovely, his was.”

Traffic came to standstill along the 40-mile route that Mr Reagan’s hearse and its accompanying motorcade took to his presidential library. At one point the giant cranes of two fire trucks suspended a giant Stars and Stripes over its path.

At the library, in the Santa Susana Mountains, mourners filed silently past at the rate of about 2,000 per hour, fulfilling one of Mr Reagan’s wishes that his departure be accessible to the public.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former actor whose rise to the governorship of California has drawn parallels with Mr Reagan, arrived to pay his respects with Maria Shriver, his wife.

Families waited up to 12 hours for their chance to spend a handful of seconds walking around Mr Reagan’s coffin. Everyone who entered the lobby of the library had to park several miles away and be swept by the Secret Service before boarding shuttle buses.

Most arrived with basic camping gear, prepared to wait through the night. Some were Democrats, who regarded their presence as a patriotic duty. Others were fathers and mothers with children who wanted the next generation to understand the previous one.

Around the country, mourners left mementoes at the half dozen sites pivotal and symbolic to Mr Reagan’s life. It began with a single cowboy hat outside the funeral home where Mr Reagan’s body started its journey, mushrooming into overflowing layers of flags, flowers, candles, notes and jars of Mr Reagan’s beloved jelly beans.

Spontaneous shrines sprang up as droves of mourners flocked to his birthplace in Tampico, Illinois, his boyhood home in Dixon, Illinois, his home in Bel Air, Los Angeles, his library, the funeral home, and at his star on the Hollywood walk of fame.

One note left at the funeral home read: “Thank you for changing the world.”

After nursing her husband of 52 years through a final devastating decade of Alzheimer’s, Mrs Reagan was relieved at his passing.

Joanne Drake, Mr Reagan’s chief of staff, said: “While it is an extremely sad time for Mrs Reagan, there is definitely a sense of relief that he is no longer suffering and that he has gone to another place.”

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