Losing Mum and Pup (11 page)

“Em, well, uh, no, Pup, not precisely. I…”

“Why?”

“Well, em, there’s the matter of, em, the fact that your kidneys aren’t functioning, plus you can’t breathe or move. Apart
from that—”

“I can breathe at
home
.”

“Yes. Yes, certainly. You’ve—ha—got me there. Ha ha. Yup. Will you have another sip of the milkshake for me? They say it’s
got all the essential—”

“What time is our reservation on the train?”

“The train. Yes. I’m working on that. But it seems the, um, bridge is washed out north of Bridgeport, so, you know, a few…
problems.”

“We’ll need music.”

“Absolutely.”

Tomorrow his regular doctors will return from their weekend frolics—no weekend frolics for this correspondent, whose motto
continues to be “Tomorrow Is Another Day.”

He sends his best love, as do I.

WFB Medical Bulletin

June 26

Today’s new term is “effective urine.”

What—pray—is “effective urine”? I myself did not, until several hours ago, know this phrase. Essentially, it is that which
carries with it out of the body things like creatinine—a chemical the very name of which I am beginning heartily to loathe.
What we seek, what we pray for, what we want even more than our own front teeth this Christmas this year is—effective urine.
Is this really too much to ask for?

In other news:

We have a drip in our arm to keep us hydrated.

Spirits: let’s face it, ten days in hospital, however nice the hospital, and this place is very good indeed, are not fun,
especially if you are the author of books like
Cruising Speed
and
Airborne
.
^*

He wants to go home.

He wants to have dinner tonight at Paone’s.

He wants me to call his barber to make an appointment.

He wants to write his column.

He wants to work on his (excellent) Goldwater book.

He wants to go sailing with Van and Alistair.

He wants me to get him his Ritalin. He decided yesterday to start calling it “Rossignol,” making for an interesting conversation.

He wants not to hear me say, “Now, Pup, I think maybe we ought to leave the catheter in just one more day.” (Let me point
out that I do not say this to him, 20 times a day, because I have nothing else to do.)

He wants a chocolate milkshake. (Which I have been smuggling in to him. I did this after taking one small taste of the “hi-protein”
milkshake provided by the hospital.)

He does not want visitors, but he loves you all very much.

He wants to be well.

He wants not to hear the words “urine” or “creatinine” or “blood work.” Doubtless, he would prefer not to hear the word “kidneys,”
though we—that is, I—are very much wanting these organs to get with the program and heal themselves.

At any rate, we (Stockholm syndrome first person plural) are neither better nor worse. But we remain confident that the kidneys
will, recognizing their role in amongst the other organs of a great and beloved man, soon get with the program and repair
themselves
tout court
.

Meantime we send you all our best love. I fully expect tomorrow’s WFB Medical Bulletin to begin with “Hosanna!”

WFB Medical Bulletin

July 1, 2007 (Mum’s birthday)

Pup came home on Friday. He is, I can say as his spokesperson, “resting comfortably.”

Urine Report: There will be no further urine reports. I know this will come as a terrible shock to many of you. Sorry, but
you’re on your own. If you want a urine report, just look down next time you go to the loo.

H
e arrived home by ambulance, and was carried upstairs to his room by two beefy young men. On their way out, one of them said
to me in a lowered voice, “He’s DNR, right?” I started a bit but, recovering, said, “Yeah.” DNR means Do Not Resuscitate.
If those are your wishes, you apply to your doctor and are given a letter from the state of Connecticut, signed by the doctor,
instructing emergency medical technicians not to bring you back from the brink. Such were indeed Pup’s wishes. Along with
the form comes a red plastic bracelet. The young man said, “If something happens, make sure he’s wearing the bracelet.” I
nodded and pressed beer money on them.

Pup was home, but he was very, very ill. His bedroom, looking out on Long Island Sound, was now cluttered with noisy machines
to help him breathe.

I’d arranged for day and night nurses. I specified that they must be… well, Pup was not one to suffer chatterboxes. One of
Mum’s nurses had been on the talkative side. She was an Italian-Polish lady (her surname, with lots of z’s and k’s and g’s,
would have won a Scrabble tournament). She was built like a bomb shelter and had interesting flame red and purple hair. She
would talk indefatigably throughout her six-hour, $465 shifts. If she left the room, Mum would groan, “She is
driving me to drink.
” But she was a good lady with a warm heart, and in the final battle with Mum, she didn’t yield an inch. And believe me, the
wrath of Pat Buckley could instill fear in an advancing column of mechanized infantry.

In the hospital two days before she died, Mum had demanded that she give her her own sleeping pills. As you can see, self-medication
was a theme with my parents.

“No, ma’am,” she replied coolly. “We’re in the hospital. In the
critical care
unit.”

“I am well aware of where I am. Just give. Me. My. Pills.”

“No, ma’am. I can’t give you pills.”

“Just.
Give. Them. To. Me.
”

“No, ma’am.”

At this, Mum’s lower mandible protruded like that thing in the movie
Alien
, just before swallowing an astronaut whole. “Just…
give
…
them… to me
.”

“No, ma’am. I will give them to your hospital nurse here, and
she
can give them to you if the doctor says it’s all right.”

This was the last conversation I heard my mother have.

As for Pup, I felt, pharmacology-wise, that the ideal nurses for him would be, say, sight-impaired deaf-mutes. Pup’s daily
intake of pills would be enough to give Hunter Thompson pause. But there was hardly any point in turning his sickroom into
a home rehab.

The third afternoon in the hospital, after Pup had rallied somewhat, he demanded that I give him an after-lunch Ritalin from
his private stash. Inasmuch as I had spent the previous three nights wide awake and physically restraining him from ripping
tubes out of his arms and trying to flee the hospital, I was of the opinion that Ritalin might not—as we medical types put
it—be indicated, and I refused to give him one.

“Just give it to me,” he growled.

“I am not going to give you a Ritalin. For heaven’s sake, Pup—you’re fibrillating.”

“Just give it to me.”

“No.” Moment of truth.

“You’re fired,” he said.

“Fine!” I said. “I didn’t ask for this job in the first place.”

We agreed on a compromise. If Gavin said he could have one, fine, party down. He phoned Gavin, who I imagine rolled his eyes
and okayed a minimal Ritalin. I spent the afternoon catering to the myriad whims of my suddenly very peppy father.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. I entered into a conspiracy with the nurses. We worked out a Kabuki dance whereby
Pup would ask for his Ritalin, and they’d give him a similar-looking Ativan pill, placing it directly on his tongue before
he could inspect it.

“I don’t understand why I’m
sleeping
so much,” he would say to me, rousing hours later from a narcoleptic slumber.

“Well, Pup,” I said, avoiding eye contact, “you know, these kidney things, they, uh, do take it out of you.”

Henry Kissinger called. “I miss your urine reports,” he said in his rumbly Teutonic baritone. I told him this was surely the
first time he had uttered those words.

Pup and Henry went back a long way: to the mid-1950s, when Henry was a young history professor at Harvard. He’d asked Pup,
then the fresh prince of belles-lettres conservatism, to come speak to his students. A friendship formed and, over the years,
deepened. In 1968, with Vietnam raging and a bitter presidential campaign going on, Henry, now an adviser to Nelson Rockefeller,
had called Pup and said to him,
Get this message through to Nixon: If Vietnam falls, word will go out that while it may be dangerous to be America’s enemy,
it is fatal to be her friend.
Pup called it in to John Mitchell. After the election, Mitchell summoned Henry to Nixon’s transition headquarters at the
Pierre Hotel in Manhattan. The rest, you know.

Pup was no fan of détente with the Soviet Union and China, which in the Buckley household was always referred to as “Red China.”
After Nixon’s China opening in 1972, Pup commented wryly in a
Playboy
article that upon receiving the news of Henry’s secret visit to Mao, “I broke wind, with heavy philosophical reservation.”
But through it all, Pup’s devotion to and respect for Henry never flickered, and he defended him fiercely against those on
the Right who wanted Henry Kissinger’s Commie-coddling head on a pike. One of Pup’s formulations, which I thought artful,
was:
How can Henry Kissinger be, simultaneously, their
[the Left’s]
enemy and
our
enemy?
That usually shut them up, though not for long.

There were one or two moments when Pup did come close to exasperation, as he did the day the news broke that Henry’s new boss,
President Gerald Ford, had declined to meet with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. To Pup, Solzhenitsyn was a secular saint. He stood
in awe of him—and there were not that many men who inspired such awe in my old man. That the president of the United States
had been too busy—the laughably pathetic excuse offered by the White House spokesperson—to meet with someone Pup called “the
voice of baptized humanity” was, well, just a bit… too… much.
^*

I pestered Pup to find out from—as I put it with callow truculence—“your pal Henry Kissinger” why President Ford was cold-shouldering
the author of
The Gulag Archipelago
. Pup sighed at the lunch table. He eventually reported that he had had a little come-to-Jesus with his pal Henry and that
Henry had sounded a bit sheepish about it all. As memory serves, he told Pup,
What can I tell you, Bill? It was a busy day, the call came in, I had five seconds to make the decision. It was a mistake
and I regret it.
Pup shrugged. He had a mantra that he trotted out when confronted with a situation not to his liking but beyond his control:
“And there it is.”
^†
There were other contentions between the two of them over the years, some of them acute, but they loved each other deeply.
I promised Henry that if there were any spectacular developments urine-wise, he would be the first to hear.

One night about two-thirty a.m., Margaret, Pup’s sweet and pleasingly taciturn night nurse, shook me awake to say that he
wanted to see me right away. I staggered down the hall, heavy-lidded. He was lying athwart his bed, which had become an eagle’s
nest of printed matter—newspapers, magazines, books—CDs, tissue boxes, and sundry detritus. I could hear Mum’s ghost:
Bill, look at this bed. It is dis-gusting.
The lights were blazing, the TV blaring, oxygen machine chugging. His Cavalier King Charles spaniels, Sebbie and Daisy, yapped
stridently at my approach. We had known one another, these doggies and I, for—what?—three years, but they still felt the need
to treat my arrivals in their master’s bedroom as if I were Charles Manson. They are the most beautiful dogs in God’s kingdom,
Cavaliers, and almost certainly the dumbest.

Pup had on his
bata
(bathrobe). His hair was all over the place. His faux tortoiseshell glasses, perched askew on his nose, gave him a sort of
mad-professor look. I relaxed. He didn’t seem in extremis.

“Yes, Pup?” I yawned.

“Christo,” he said, “I have something
very important
to discuss with you.”