Mum and Pup and Me

Christopher Buckley, the son of the conservative writer and thinker William F. Buckley, writes an elegaic portrait of the final days of his parents. Here are some excerpts.

The nurse buzzed me into the Critical Care Unit. The chic and stunning Mrs. William F. Buckley — the society columnists used to call her that — lay on her bed, shrunken, open-eyed, unseeing, a thick plastic respirator tube protruding from her mouth, making a loud, rhythmic bellows noise as it pumped and withdrew air from her lungs. I’d driven eight hours through a storm to get here and knew pretty much what to expect, but I lost it and began to sob. The nurse kindly left.

I drew up a chair and held what I could of her hand, which was cold and bony and edematous with fluid. The nurse returned shortly and said that Dr. D’Amico was on the phone. Joe D’Amico was her orthopedist, a kindly, attentive and warm man. The week before, he amputated three dry-gangrenous, mummified toes on her left foot. She stubbed them the previous November and, having fallen and broken so many bones in her body over the years, she, in the fashion of Victorian ladies, took to her bed to die. Sixty-five years of smoking cigarettes, with attendant problems of circulation, had taken their toll. A few days before, an operation to install a stent — to forestall additional amputations — went wrong, and a mortal infection set in.

Joe came on the line. He said how sorry he was, that she was a wonderful lady. He said: “What you’re seeing there isn’t her. She’s already in heaven.”

Joe and I had never discussed religion. I doubt, for that matter, that he and she had ever discussed it. I don’t think I ever once heard Mum utter a religious or spiritual sentiment, a considerable feat considering that she was married for 57 years to one of the most prominent Catholics in the country. But she rigorously observed the proprieties. When Pup taped an episode of “Firing Line” in the Sistine Chapel with Princess Grace, Malcolm Muggeridge, Charlton Heston and David Niven, Mum was included in the post-taping audience with Pope John Paul II. There’s a photo of the occasion: she has on more black lace than a Goya duchess. The total effect is that of Mary Magdalene dressed by Bill Blass.

I stammered out my thanks to Joe for everything he’d done for her. He asked, “Do you want to leave the respirator in or let nature take its course?” I said, “Let’s remove the respirator.”

I’d brought with me a pocket copy of the book of Ecclesiastes. A line in “Moby-Dick” lodged in my mind long ago: “The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe.” I grabbed it off my bookshelf on the way here, figuring that a little fine-hammered steel would probably be a good thing to have on this trip. I’m no longer a believer, but I haven’t quite reached the point of reading aloud from Christopher Hitchens’s “God Is Not Great” at deathbeds of loved ones.

Soon after, a doctor came in to remove the respirator. It was quiet and peaceful in the room, just pings and blips from the monitor. I stroked her hair and said, the words coming out of nowhere, surprising me, “I forgive you.”

Pup and I had engaged in our own Hundred Years’ War over the matter of faith. Our Sturmiest und Drangiest times were over religion. Pup had the most delicious, reliable, wicked, vibrant sense of humor of anyone I knew, yet his inner Savonarola was released at the merest hint of (to use his term) impiety. Finally exhausted, I adopted — whether hypocritically or cowardly or wisely — a Potemkin stance of being back in the fold. My agnosticism, once defiant, had gone underground. I no longer had the desire to nail my theses to his church door. By now I knew we didn’t have much time left, and I didn’t want to spend it locking theological horns, making him heartsick with my intransigence.

I think about them every day. Orphanhood proceeds, tanned — as Leon Wieseltier hoped —and otherwise. It comes in waves. One moment you’re doing fine, living your life, even perhaps feeling some sort of primal sense of liberation — I can stay out as late as I want, and I don’t have to make my bed! Then in the next instant, boom, there it is. It has various ways of presenting, as doctors say of disease.

Sometimes it comes in the form of a black hole inside you, sucking the rest of you into it; at other times it is a sense of disconnection, as if you had been holding your mother’s hand in a crowd and suddenly she let go.

The summer after Pup died, I got a midnight call with the news that my friend Rust Hills, the editor and writer, had died. Rust was a great admirer of Montaigne. I thumbed through my copy of the “Essays” and found this: “The ceaseless labor of your life is to build the house of death.” It’s probably too downbeat a sentiment by American smiley-face standards to make it onto a refrigerator magnet, but . . . pas mal. You want to be able, when the end comes, to look the Reaper right in the eye and say, “Oh, puh-leeze.” I’m sure that’s how Mum did it. She’d have added, “And what, pray, is that preposterous costume supposed to indicate?”

“Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death,”Hazlitt wrote, “is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern — why then should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?”

Any English major can quote a good game. Ask me how I feel when my doctor says with a frown, “I’d like to do one more P.S.A. test.”

Recently, I was driving behind a belchy city bus and suddenly found myself thinking, not for the first time, about whether Pup is in heaven. He spent so much of his life on his knees in church, so much of his life doing the right thing by so many people, a thousand acts of generosity. I hesitate to put it this way, but I’m dying of curiosity: how did it turn out, Pup? Were you right, after all? Is there a heaven? Is Mum there with you? Grumbling, almost certainly, about the “inedible food,” and saying, “Bill, you’ve got to speak to that absurd St. Peter creature about getting Christopher in — I mean, it’s all too ridiculous for words.”

Here are three letters in response to that article.

I have long been a fan of both Buckleys — William F. Jr. and Christopher. However, the younger, in writing about the elder, has proved again that a son should think twice before writing publicly about his father. It is always a complicated relationship, and to blame William F. Buckley Jr.’s parental shortcomings — and some of them were simply astonishing — on the “Great Man” syndrome does an injustice to the average guy who works two jobs, pays the bills and still finds time to coach his kid’s Little League team. If only he were “Greater”: he could justifiably skip the ballgames, the hospitalizations and the graduations. And who could blame him? Worse, for those unfortunate kids stuck with paternal miscreants who don’t also happen to be Great Men, is there any convenient way for them to explain their plight? I agree that the elder Buckley was a great man. But I prefer the story of my mother, who never wrote a book or appeared on a television show but raised six happy children. At her funeral, someone described her as “an extraordinary woman who lived a very ordinary life.” She was, in other words, a great mom.

AL LARKIN

Milton, Mass.

I never had the pleasure of knowing William F. Buckley Jr., the private man — only the profound displeasure of knowing his public persona. While I am touched by Christopher Buckley’s grief, we needn’t overlook some less-than-savory facts about his father. W.F.B. began his career vehemently defending the worst excesses of McCarthyism; throughout the civil rights movement, opposed integration and black suffrage; during the Vietnam War, advocated using nuclear weapons against the North Vietnamese; supported unconditionally the racist apartheid government of South Africa; cheerled for the genocidal C.I.A.-backed coup against Allende in Chile; and, in the early years of the AIDS pandemic, recommended that H.I.V.-diagnosed patients be forcibly tattooed on their buttocks. Despite the virtues of his intellect and charisma, W.F.B.’s only legacy to us is that mixture of homophobia, greed, racism, hypocrisy and military recklessness that is 21st-century conservatism. And, of course, a first-rate novelist son — Christopher is twice the prose artist his father ever was, for all the elder Buckley’s greater facility.

DAVID A. MURPHY

Providence, R.I.

Christopher Buckley’s remembrances as the only child of his celebrated parents, especially those of the sad last days of his father, cast William Buckley in a warmer light than that in which I had previously viewed him. The son’s generosity of spirit and endless devotion to his father is quite moving, given the often-challenging nature of their relationship. Still, even from a loving son’s perspective, William F. Buckley is portrayed as a relentlessly self-serving and self-centered person. Should that surprise us about the father of modern conservatism?

JOHN MUSGROVE

San Francisco