No, actually, he wasn't universally beloved and idolized. Certainly not by me, who lost so many of my gay friends during his administration, when the AIDS crisis was in its infancy, and he and his neo-con cabal refused to acknowledge the "gay cancer" and spent no money on research, education or prevention.
I spent the eight years of Reagan's presidency waiting for nuclear winter, waiting for the hands of the doomsday clock to move to midnight.

I have not forgotten that under his stewardship the government grew, Marines were slain in their barracks in Lebanon (and why, exactly were they there?), and his administration side-stepped the rule of law to sell arms to Iran in order to fund the Contras in Nicaragua.

I am neither saddened nor made joyous by his passing. The moving hand has written. The cosmic horse laugh, that the man who remade the Republican Party in his own, ultra-conservative image, could have benefited from stem-cell research (an anathema to those same neo-cons)is merely a sad echo in the universe.

My own mother has Alzheimer's and membership in that awful club somehow connects me to Mr. Reagan's family. For them, and for him, I feel pity. Pity only, and nothing more.

For what this country has become, for the journey that began with Mr. Reagan's single step, for that I feel deep sorrow and loss.