Losing Mum and Pup (4 page)

We were alone again, briefly, until another doctor arrived to remove the respirator. He said, “You might not want to be here
for this.” No, I didn’t. I went out into the corridor and hovered. I should have walked to the end of it. The sound as a respirator
is removed isn’t one you want to hear. But it was quiet and peaceful in the room when I returned, just the pings and beeps
emanating from the monitor. I stroked her hair and said, the words surprising me, coming out of nowhere, “I forgive you.”

It sounded—even to me, at the time—like a terribly presumptuous statement, but it needed to be said. She never would have
asked for forgiveness herself, even in extremis. She was far too proud. Only once or twice, when she had been truly awful,
had she apologized to me. Generally, she was defiant—almost magnificently so—when her demons slipped their leash. Lucy, wise
Lucy, had the rule
Don’t go to bed angry
. Now, watching Mum go to bed for the last time, I didn’t want any anger left between us, so out came the unrehearsed words.
For my sake more than for hers. Well, if she was already in heaven, it was all moot anyway. Right?

The doctor had said after removing the tube, “It usually goes quickly.” I sat beside her, watching the monitor, with its numbers
and differently colored lines and chirps that tracked her breathing and heartbeat and other diminishing vitals. Her heart
rate would slow, then quicken, then slow. After some minutes, I realized that I had become fixated on the monitor. I heard
her saying to me—a half century earlier:
Are you just going to sit there and watch
television
all day?
It would have been some spectacularly sunny Saturday morning, and I was glued to the telly (her term for it), watching Johnny
Weissmuller nodding in agreement as the remarkably intelligible chimp Cheeta explained to him that Jane was being held hostage
by evil Belgian ivory hunters 3.4 miles north-northwest of the abandoned mine. I read, sometime after, that monitor fixation
is routine in death watches: We have become, even in death, TV watchers.

Her heart rate and respiration slowed. It didn’t requicken. I texted on my cell phone to Lucy: “End near.”

Just before two o’clock in the morning on April 15, the respiratory line indicated that her breathing had stopped. Yet her
heart continued to beat, according to the faint but distinct blips. I rushed to find the nurse.
It’s normal,
she said.
It takes a little while
. She examined the monitor, held Mum’s wrist, and nodded. It was over.

She went to fetch the doctor so he could “pronounce.” He arrived, held a pen flashlight to her eyes, put a stethoscope to
her chest.
I’m sorry
, he said. Did I want an autopsy? No. My journalistic training kicked in as I remembered the “TK” in my obituary. What had
she died of? I volunteered, “Natural causes?” thinking to provide cover for the apologetic doctor and Stamford Hospital, for
whom I had nothing but gratitude and praise. “No,” he said, “infection. She died of infection.” I winced at the thought of
entering, “at two a.m., of infection….” Surely one of the least attractive (Mum’s term) words in the language. Couldn’t we
get away with “after a long illness”? It had certainly been that, too.

I noticed the doctor’s name on his ID badge. It sounded exotic. I asked where he was from. “Macedonia,” he said almost warily,
as if that required some explaining. I managed not to say, “Alexander the Great.”

He left us alone. I stroked her forehead for a while, as she used to mine, and spoke a few words to her, which, strangely,
I cannot remember. Words of goodbye, I suppose they were. I tried to close her eyes. In the movies, they close. In real life,
they don’t. This is why in the old days they would put coins over the lids. I pulled the sheet up over her face, which had
the effect of transforming the room from a state-of-the-art medical site into a funeral parlor. I took my last look at her
and left.

Danny found me sitting by the emergency front door, weeping onto my opened laptop as I e-mailed out the obituary to the first
wave of recipients. We drove home through empty Stamford streets. We tried to wake Pup, but by now he had taken enough sleeping
pills to narcotize a rhino, so I left a note by his bed that said, “Mum’s suffering is over,” drank two stiff Bloody Marys
with Danny, and went to bed in the room I grew up in, listening to the rain against the windows and watching the branches
of the tall pine tree I used to climb sway wildly in the wind.

P
up woke me about eight-thirty, calling from his garage study. I’d e-mailed him the obituary before going to sleep. He said
how glad he was to have it. He’d always been encouraging and complimentary about my writing—and just as often critical. Pup
was generous, if a tough grader. But in recent years, he had found it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to compliment
something I’d written, unless it was about him. (I say this with bemusement now, but at the time it wasn’t all that bemusing.)
Of my last book, a novel published two weeks before Mum died and which reviewers were (for the most part) describing as my
best to date, he’d confined his comments in an e-mail P.S.: “This one didn’t work for me. Sorry.”

I walked to his study and tried to give him a hug, though it was hard to reach him through all the clutter and Jaime. Pup
had occupied this converted garage space since 1952, and except for the papers serially shipped up to Yale over the years,
he hadn’t thrown away anything, with the result that the study had become a
son et lumière
exhibit that might be titled “The William F. Buckley Jr. Experience.” (About a year later, I would find myself cleaning out
this truly Augean stable. One week and two Dumpsters later, I had only scratched the surface.)

Jaime was Pup’s computer factotum. They spoke Spanish exclusively. He seemed always to be there, possibly owing to Pup’s Rube
Goldberg computer habits. In 2008, he was probably the only human left on the planet who still used WordStar, the word-processing
system he had learned in 1983. Loading WordStar into his up-to-date Dell computer was akin to installing the controls of a
Sopwith Camel in a F-16 fighter jet, but Pup could not be budged from his WordStar. Generations of WFB amanuenses had to learn
this cuneiform in order to edit his manuscripts and articles.

He was, on this dreary, rain-swept Sunday morning, red-eyed, puffy-faced, out of breath, in rough shape. He was gradually
suffocating from emphysema and had just lost his wife of fifty-seven years. We embraced as best we could amid the office and
Jaime jam. I glanced at his computer screen. He’d been stabbing at the keyboard, composing an e-mail alert about Mum’s death.
There were multiple typos. Her name was misspelled. In recent years, Pup’s e-mails had become celebrated among his many correspondents
for their increasing inscrutability. Once one of the most expert and accurate touch typists in the land, he now simply put
his hands over the keyboard wherever they fell and commenced typing—and kept
on
typing—with the result that his e-mails often read like coded transmissions from a submarine:

Daer cgurisito,

Am sO hpinyg yiy wiutgh jw her for thep conserg tyjis friady!!! xxP

[Trans.: Dear Christo, I am so very happy you will be at the concert on Friday.]

I teased him that he ought to provide his correspondents with Enigma machines in order to decode these transmissions. Once,
despairing of being able to decipher a single word, I wrote back, “Dear Pup, I honestly am eager to know what you say here,
but I just can’t make it out.” He called back and said, laughing, “I can’t tell what it’s about, either.” I cleaned up the
spelling of Mum’s name on his e-mail. Age six, I had sat on his lap right here in this room and learned to touch-type, “The
quick brown fox jumped over the lazy cow,” on his old Royal typewriter.

The storm was still blowing. Pup, Danny, and I went out to lunch at Jimmy’s Seaside Tavern. We ordered Bloody Marys and beers
and wine and Reuben sandwiches and onion rings. “Shall we go see a flick?” he said, and the words brought me back a half century.
Summer evenings after dinner when I was little, he’d say, “Shall we go see a flick?” I’d race to get the
Stamford Advocate
with the movie listings. We’d jump into the car and make it to the theater just as the movie was starting. Within five minutes
he’d be snoring like a chain saw. Mum would poke him—“Ducky, wake up”—whereupon Ducky would snort back to consciousness, look
up at Gary Cooper (or whoever) on the screen, and demand in a loud voice, “Ducky, who
is
that man? What is he doing?”

I said to him, “Well, sure, why not?”

He smiled in a funny way and said, “I guess we can do anything we
want
to.” It occurred to me, looking at him, that it was the first time in fifty-seven years he didn’t have to wonder what Mum
might say. He could—yes—do whatever he wanted; not that he hadn’t always—I chuckle a bit darkly as I type—but that droit du
seigneur autonomy had come at considerable cost. We didn’t go to a movie after all. He was tired and needed a nap. About five
o’clock, Danny rang me from his apartment over the garage study to say that Pup was going to mass. I said I’d come.

Normally, I didn’t. Normally, when home of a Sunday, I would discreetly make myself scarce around this time, when he would
gather up the Hispanic staff and drive to St. Mary’s Church, where a complaisant priest would say a private Latin mass for
him. Pup was a defiantly pre-Vatican II Catholic. One of the reforms of Vatican II, along with a perfectly comprehensible
but perfectly bland liturgy, is the Sign of Peace, at which the priest urges the congregants to turn to one another and shake
hands, or kiss, hug, high-five, power dap, whatever. Pup, despite his paradigmatically generous Christianity, found this “kumbaya”
beyond the pale, and ten seconds in advance, he would preemptively drop to his knees and bury his face in his hands in perfervid
orison.

Today, however, I reckoned, was not a day to skip church, so I went with them in the still-sheeting rain. Pup wept throughout
the mass. Afterward he told Danny, our go-between, that he was “so pleased” I had attended.

Pup and I had engaged in our own Hundred Years’ War over the matter of faith. Finally exhausted, I had— whether hypocritically
or cowardly or wisely—put on a
Potemkin
facade 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
antlers, making him heartsick with my intransigence.

It’s only now, after his death, that I’m able to write about this, without fear of initiating another cannonade volley of
(all-
too-
intelligible) e-mails on the subject of my eternal damnation.
^*
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. I was never, even
in the fullest bloom of my agnosticism, a mocker—more the bemused skeptic. I’ve written both a serious play
^†
about a sixteenth-century Catholic martyr and a comic novel
^††
about some corrupt winemaking monks. The latter was an affectionate farce. I myself spent four years at a monastic New England
boarding school and look back on it with great fondness and abundant admiration for many of the monks who suffered through
those four years of me.

As for the novel, Pup did not find the humor in it, though others were chuckling. An uncle of mine, every inch as pious as
Pup, said to me at his son’s wedding, “That is the funniest darn book I have ever read!” I pointed to Pup, across the room,
and said, “Do me a favor, would you? Tell him what you just told me.” Uncle Gerry scurried off enthusiastically on his evangelical
assignment, only to return, shrugging. “What did he say?” “He just stared at me.”