Los Angeles ? In a week of enduring images, perhaps the most poignant came at the end.

Nancy Reagan, saying her final farewell to her husband of 52 years, rested her head on his casket, crying and caressing the mahogany coffin as she was surrounded by the president’s three surviving children.

They formed a picture of a tight-knit family, loving and supportive, all the more touching because such unity had so often eluded them in the past.

The public perception of the former first couple’s relationship with their children, particularly with daughter Patti Davis, had long been one of a family divided.

The children found themselves competing for attention from a father whose time was split — first by acting, then by divorce, then by politics. In the end, however, all found a way to reconcile with a man they came to revere.

“The more I understood him, the more I began to love him as a father and put things behind me,” Michael, Reagan’s son from his first marriage, to actress Jane Wyman, told The Associated Press in an interview this past week. “I started to remember the wonderful times he gave me instead of the times he couldn’t be there because he had other obligations.”

The former president’s surviving children had been in the background while the nation mourned their father. Another child from Reagan’s first marriage, Maureen, died of cancer in 2001 at age 60.

Until Friday, they spoke about their relationships with him only in magazine columns or brief interviews.

But during the burial service at their father’s presidential library, Michael, Patti and Ron Reagan gave eulogies that honored him as caring, warm and committed.

“Honest, compassionate, graceful, brave,” said Ron Reagan, 46. “He was the most plainly decent man you could ever hope to meet.”

Nancy Reagan, center, is comforted by son Ron Reagan, left, daughter Patti Davis, second from right, and stepson Michael Reagan during Friday's burial ceremonies for former President Ronald Reagan at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif.

Davis, 51, wrote in an essay scheduled to appear in Newsweek this week that her father remained in shadow for much of her life.

“No one ever saw all of him,” she wrote. “It took me nearly four decades to allow my father his shadows, his reserve, to sit silently with him and not clamor for something more.”

America, she wrote, often seemed the family’s most important child.

“I resented the country at times for its demands on him, its ownership of him,” she said.

Davis and Ron Reagan, their father’s children with Nancy, rejected their father’s politics and spoke out against some of his policies as president, including those on the nuclear arms race and AIDS.

Patti even rejected her father’s name, adopting her mother’s maiden name instead, and published books that stung her parents. “Home Front,” her 1986 novel, was about a daughter who grows up in a powerful political family with a calculating and power-hungry mother.

The Reagans did not publicly comment about the book at the time but reportedly were hurt by its unfavorable allusions to the family.

For Michael and Maureen Reagan, it wasn’t politics but their parents’ divorce that forced them to sacrifice time with their father.

Michael Reagan, 58, a conservative radio talk show host and syndicated columnist, said he had since gained a better perspective.

“I think anybody who was raised in a family like ours as children, there’s something you always want — it’s attention,” he said in the interview with the AP.

As they grew older, and especially over the last decade as the president’s powerful personality receded into the darkness of Alzheimer’s, the criticism evolved into compassion, the hard feelings made way for understanding.

Davis reconciled with her parents in October 1994, two months before her father went public about having Alzheimer’s.

In Newsweek, she wrote that she and her mother decided to quit their “long dispiriting war, allowing the rest of the family to breathe easier.”