Losing Mum and Pup (25 page)

I
began this book on the note of becoming an orphan, so perhaps it makes sense to return to that theme in this penultimate chapter.
I type this now a year and a half after Mum died and over half a year since Pup left. Some dust has settled, some continues
to swirl.

I think about them every day, and not—I venture—because I have been at work on this book. Writing it (I suspect) was intended
to enable catharsis; now, as I reach the end, it seems to me that I may have written it out of a more basic need: as an excuse
to spend more time with them before letting them go—if, indeed, one ever really lets them go. So instead of a working-it-out
exercise, perhaps this is just a black-and-white album of memories, in which the unfond memories can be leeched of bitterness
and settle quietly and stingless like scattered autumn leaves on the soft forest floor. It feels to me like that, at any rate.

Orphanhood proceeds, meanwhile, tanned (as Leon hoped) and otherwise. People are wonderfully solicitous.
How are you doing?
they say, putting a sympathetic emphasis on the last word, to show that they actually mean it. Suddenly—writing this—I remember
Pup telling me years and years ago about a book by Wilfred Sheed with the title
People Will Always Be Kind
. I’ve never read it; it’s just that somehow everything one way or the other seems to remind me of Pup or Mum.

It comes in waves, my fellow orphans will probably inform you. One moment you’re doing fine, living your life, even perhaps
feeling some primal sense of liberation—
I can stay out as late as I want and I don’t have to make my bed!—
and then in the next, boom, there it is. It has many ways of presenting (as doctors say of a disease). Sometimes it comes
in the form of a black hole inside you, sucking the rest of you into it; other times it’s a sense of disconnection, as if
you had been holding your mother’s hand in a crowd and suddenly she let go, and now here you are, not alone, exactly, but
it
feels
alone. Yesterday on television, I watched young children pay tribute to their fathers and mothers who died in the two towers
on 9/11 when the children were four, five, or six years old. I can’t imagine
their
sense of orphaning. Prattling on about mine, at age fifty-five, seems pathetic by contrast. As Mum would say, “Oh, do pull
yourself together and stop carrying on in this fashion.” Yes, Mum. I’m almost done.

Advice? Let’s see. Having been through the experience, one really ought to return with a pointer or two. There are seventy-seven
million of us boomers; many of us have already lost the ’rents, and the rest of us will be going through the experience later
if not sooner.

The only
concrete
bit of advice—don’t laugh—is: Have Mom and Dad prenegotiate the funeral expenses. I’ve told my story of the funeral home
price list to a number of people, and one of them said, nodding, “Mom negotiated
her
cremation ahead of time. You’d be surprised how much the price comes down.” This sounds like very good advice, so I pass
it along. And if that doesn’t work, when Mom or Dad begins to fail, get them to Belfast, Maine. (See footnote, page 46.)

As to the “you’re next” aspect that I mentioned in the preface: There’s not a whole lot to be done on this score, other than
the usual boring things—don’t smoke, don’t eat anything that tastes really good, and spend most of the rest of your life on
a StairMaster. In a few days, I’ll come up on the twentieth anniversary of the day I gave up smoking, and that’s a good feeling.
I rather like breathing. Still, I wonder if our obsession with longevity is entirely… healthy.

“Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death,” wrote William Hazlitt, “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?”

Well, any English major can quote all sorts of people and talk a good game. Ask me how I feel when Dr. Hughes tells me, “I’d
like to do another PSA test, if you don’t mind.”

My dear friend Rust Hills, who died this summer (in Belfast, Maine), was a great fan of Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne spent
a
lot
of time thinking about death. (This seems to be a French trait.) Rust died a darn good death at age eighty-three: One August
day, in the company of his wife and daughter and grandson, in a house by the sea, he had a Scotch, a bowl of clam chowder,
and a slice of blueberry pie and—died. Not a bad way to go. Put me down for the same.

I couldn’t find anything in Montaigne about Scotch, clam chowder, or blueberry pie, but I found this: “The ceaseless labor
of your life is to build the house of death.” Probably too downbeat-sounding by American smiley-face standards to end up on
a refrigerator magnet, but
pas mal
. I guess one way or the other, it boils down to being able to look the Reaper right in the eye with a smile and say, “Oh,
puh-leeze.” I bet that was how Mum did it, adding, “And what, pray, is that
absurd
costume supposed to indicate?”

Yesterday, I was driving behind a belchy city bus on the way back from the grocery store 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 million acts of generosity. I’m—I shouldn’t use the word—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 if there is a heaven and you are in it, are you thinking,
Poor Christo—he’s not going to make it.
And is Mum saying,
Bill, you have got to speak to that absurd creature at the Gates and
tell
him he’s got to admit Christopher. It’s too ridiculous for words.

Even in my dreams, they’re looking after me. So perhaps one is never really an orphan after all.

T
hree days after the memorial service at St. Patrick’s, and a week shy of the first anniversary of Mum’s death, Danny and I
loaded the heavy bronze cross into the back of the van and drove up to Sharon. For the first time since February 27—it seemed—it
wasn’t raining. The sun was shining. It was a beautiful Connecticut spring day.

Aunt Pitts and Uncle Jimmy and the funeral director and two grave diggers were waiting for us along with the hearse, at the
little cemetery by the brook. Brian the funeral director had called me on my cell as Danny and I were on the road, to report
with professional alarm in his voice that the cover on Pup’s pecan coffin had “split” somewhat during his stay aboveground.
It didn’t sound like a Faulknerian-level coffin disaster, so I said not to worry. Pup wouldn’t have. As to burying him
in corpore
in Sharon, I think he’d have forgiven my final disobedience. Doubtless Mum will haunt me to the end of my days for bringing
her back to Sharon, but she’ll make a great ghost and I can’t wait to be haunted by her.

With the help of Brian’s teenage son and the grave diggers, Danny and I lifted Pup and Mum from the hearse and carried them
across the graves of his sisters Mary Ann (buried here in 1928, having lived for one day), Maureen (1964), Aloise (1967),
and Jane (2007). I could hear Jane saying with an unmistakable hint of triumph,
Why, Pat, what a pleasant surprise.
And Mum replying heavily,
Yes,
isn’t
it?

Pup’s English goddaughter, Camilla, who had poured gin into all the flowerpots at the wake, sent a beautiful spray of white
flowers all the way from Wales, with a note inscribed in her own hand:
Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest
. So between my e-mail on the morning he died and Camilla’s note, Pup went off well bracketed with quotes from
Hamlet
. One could do worse.

We set the coffin on the straps and lowered them into the spring-warm earth. Birds sang in the budding branches. The late
afternoon sun slanted through the still-bare limbs. We each took a handful of earth and sprinkled it into the grave, said
our various silent farewells, and left them there, together, in each other’s arms.

There’s a Greek myth that Pup loved to retell, of Philemon and Baucis. They were a devoted old couple who provided hospitality
to Jupiter and Mercury, traveling incognito. The gods then revealed themselves in all their glory, smote the crap out of everyone
who
hadn’t
shown them hospitality, and rewarded the old couple by turning their hut into a gorgeous temple. They asked them if there
was anything else they wanted. Philemon and Baucis replied that, yes, they’d like to be together for all eternity. So the
gods changed them into two trees whose limbs intertwined. It’s a lovely story.

William F. Buckley Jr. and Patricia Taylor Buckley were, I think it’s safe to say, a more complicated package than old Philemon
and Baucis—and almost certainly more fun to have dinner with. But their devotion to each other, however complex, was no less
intense, no less enduring, and no less deserving of celebration. I hope this book, for all its complexities, is a testament
to that devotion. They were… well, I’m out of words, finally. They were my Mum and Pup.

—September 12, 2008
Washington, D.C.

Thank you, once again, my very dear Mr. Karp. Thanks, yet again, dear Binky. Thank you, beloved Lucy. Bless you, Pitts. You,
too, Jolie. Thank you, John Tierney, Greg Zorthian, Frances Bronson, Jack Fowler, Linda Bridges, Dusty Rhodes. At Twelve (this
is starting to sound like an interminable Oscar speech): the indefatigable Obi-Wan, Cary Goldstein, and the indispensable
and unflagging Harvey-Jane Kowal, and Sona Vogel. And, of course, once again, the Faithful Hound Jake, who kept the perimeter
secure.

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