His timing, as always, was perfect.

Almost exactly 20 years after he stood before the aging soldiers of D-Day on the cliffs of Normandy, saluting the warriors who had saved democracy, Ronald Reagan died, quietly, in his house on St. Cloud Drive in Bel Air last Saturday, ending his long and noble battle against Alzheimer's disease. "It was very peaceful," a family member said. "It was time."

Word of Reagan's death came as the world was once again commemorating the Allied victory over Nazi tyranny. As presidents and princes, old soldiers and sailors, widows and grandchildren gathered on those same wind-swept beaches last weekend, they, and America, were hearing Reagan's words as they mourned his death. "These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc," Reagan had said on June 6, 1984, hailing the Rangers who helped spearhead the liberation. "These are the men who took the cliffs." Grown men wept that day in 1984; Reagan's voice caught with genuine emotion. "The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right," he said, "faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead-or on the next."

He spoke with such grace, such conviction and such power that only the most cynical observers recalled that Reagan himself had spent World War II in Hollywood, making training films. That day at Normandy-and all the other days of his remarkable public life-Reagan was doing what he did best: making us believe in a vision of America as a beacon of light in a world of darkness, as the home of an essentially brave and good people. "We will always remember," he said that long-ago day. "We will always be proud. We will always be prepared, so we may be always free." Freedom-from self-doubt, from the Soviet threat, from uneasiness about our national power and capacity to do great things-was Reagan's gift to his country.

He was 93; for his devoted wife, Nancy, now 80, her beloved husband's death ends a half-century love affair and a decade of anguishing illness and caregiving. She may find some comfort in the nation's outpouring of affection; few men in our history have been held in such warm regard. This week Reagan will receive a hero's farewell in Washington, lying in state in the rotunda of the Capitol followed by a funeral service at the National Cathedral. Then he will go home again, back across the nation, to be interred on the grounds of his presidential library in southern California's Simi Valley.

For Mrs. Reagan, it will be the final act of what she has called her husband's "long goodbye." For the rest of us, the passing of the 40th president marks the close of one of the great American sagas: the rise and reign of the mysterious and elusive Ronald Reagan.

He fought the good fight for years. Toward the end, in the late 1990s, he could only remember the beginning. As Reagan's memory faded, the years seemed to fall away: the presidency, the governorship, Hollywood, sportscasting. Among his sharpest recollections was his youth in Illinois. In chats with guests in his Los Angeles office and in bits of conversation with his family at home in Bel Air, he would talk about learning to read newspapers on the front porch with his mother, about playing with his older brother, Neil, about setting off for the picture-perfect little campus of Eureka College. And there were his early days on the Rock River, where he swam in the summers and ice-skated in the winter. A picture of the river hung in his retirement office in Century City, and visitors would ask him about it. Again and again he would tell the story. "You know, that's where I used to be a lifeguard-I saved 77 lives." There had been a log, he went on, where he carved a notch for every swimmer he rescued. "It was obviously an important part of his life, something he cherished," an aide recalled. "Being a lifeguard was ever-present in his memory." The image lingered when everything else was disappearing.

The lifeguard would grow up to seduce and shape America. When Reagan became president in January 1981, the country was suffering from what his predecessor, Jimmy Carter, described as a "crisis of confidence." After triumph in World War II and the boom of the 1950s, postwar American optimism seemed to peak just before John F. Kennedy's assassination. After Dallas came Vietnam and Watergate. On Carter's watch inflation spiked, deficits soared, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and Islamic militants took 52 U.S. diplomats hostage in Iran. Serious people began to wonder whether the presidency was too big a job for any one man.

Then along came Reagan-nearly 70, the emotionally distant son of an alcoholic Midwestern shoe salesman and a pious, theatrical mother. A former movie actor who gave his only critically acclaimed performance before Pearl Harbor, he was a sunny Californian who amiably ducked his head while talking tough on bureaucracy at home and communism abroad, pushing the nation's political conversation to the right.

In the White House, Reagan proved a maddeningly contradictory figure. An eloquent advocate of traditional values, he divorced his first wife and was often estranged from his children. A fierce advocate of balanced budgets, he never proposed one. A dedicated anti-communist, he reached out to the Soviet Union and helped end the cold war. An icon of button-down morality, he led an administration beleaguered by scandals. A man capable of nuanced thinking, he strongly believed in Armageddon.

He mangled facts; caricatured welfare recipients; opened his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., in the county where three civil-rights workers had been murdered for trying to overthrow Jim Crow; presided over a dark recession in 1982-83; seemed uncaring about the emerging HIV/AIDS crisis, and, in the Iran-contra scandal, came perilously close to-and may have committed-impeachable offenses.

Reagan, then, should have been as divisive a politician as Bill Clinton or George W. Bush-a man about whom the nation was closely and bitterly split. And while many people were consistently critical of Reagan, he still left office with a 63 percent approval rating. The roots of our own age's attack politics and ideological divisions lie in the Reagan years, yet the man himself seemed to dwell just above the arena, escaping widespread political enmity.

What was his secret? His personal gifts were enormous and helped smooth the rough edges of his rhetoric and his policies. Reagan was witty, eloquent and bold. Wheeled into the operating room after being shot in the chest on March 30, 1981, the president looked up at the doctors and murmured, "Please tell me you're all Republicans." Coming to after the surgery, he whispered to Nancy, "Honey, I forgot to duck." At the Brandenburg Gate in 1987, he stood in the heart of divided Berlin and cried, "Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." And eventually it was gone.