Excerpt: 'Losing Mum & Pup'
Read an excerpt from Christopher Buckley's new book.
June 29, 2009— -- Within the span of 12 months between 2007 and 2008, Christopher Buckley had to cope with the death of his father, William F. Buckley, the father of the modern conservative movement, and his mother, Patricia Taylor Buckley, one of New York's most glamorous socialites. The relationship between the three of them was as close as it was complicated.
In "Losing Mum & Pup," Buckley describes their final year together and how it felt to become an orphan at the age of 55. To all those coping with a parent's death, he offers solace and warmth.
Read an excerpt of the book below and head to the "GMA" Library for more good reads.
I'm not sure how this book will turn out. I mostly write novels, and I've found, having written half a dozen, that if you're lucky, the ending turns out a surprise and you wind up with something you hadn't anticipated in the outline. I suppose it's a process of outsmarting yourself (not especially hard in my case). Perhaps I'm outsmarting myself by writing this book at all. I'd pretty much resolved not to write a book about my famous parents. But I'm a writer, for better or worse, and when the universe hands you material like this, not writing about it seems either a waste or a conscious act of evasion.
By "material like this," I mean losing both your parents within a year. If that sounds callous or cavalier, it's not meant to be. My sins are manifold and blushful, but callousness and arrogance are not among them (at least, I hope not). The cliché is that a writer's life is his capital, and I find myself, as the funereal dust settles and the flowers dry, wanting—needing, perhaps more accurately—to try to make sense of it and put the year to rest, as I did my parents. Invariably, one seeks to move on. A book is labor, and as Pup taught me from a very early age—so early, indeed, that I didn't have the foggiest idea what he was talking about—"Industry is the enemy of melancholy." Now I get it. There's this, too: My parents were not—with all respect to every other set of son-and-daughter-loving, wonderful parents in the wide, wide world—your average mom and dad. They were William F. Buckley Jr. and Patricia Taylor Buckley, both of them—and I hereby promise that this will be the only time I deploy this particular cliché—larger-than-life people. A gross understatement in their case. I wonder, having typed that: Is it name-dropping when they're your own parents?
But larger than life they both were, and then some. Larger than death, too, to judge from the public outpouring and from the tears of the people who loved them and mourn them and miss them, none more than their son, even if at times I was tempted to pack them off to earlier graves. Larger-than-life people create larger-than-life dramas.
To the extent this story has a larger-than-personal dimension, it is an account of becoming an orphan. I realize that "orphan" sounds like an overdramatic term for becoming parentless at age fifty-five; but I was struck by the number of times the word occurred in the eight hundred condolence letters I received after my father died. I hadn't thought of myself as an "orphan" until about the sixth or seventh letter: Now you're an orphan. . . .I know the pain myself of being an orphan. . . .You must feel so lonely, being an orphan. . . . When I became an orphan it felt like the earth dropping out from under me. At length a certain froideur encroached as the thought formed, So, you're an orphan now. I was jolted happily out of my thousand-yard stare a month later by an e-mail from my old pal Leon Wieseltier, to whom I'd written to say that I was finally headed off to Arizona for some R&R: "May your orphanhood be tanned."Orphanhood was a condition I had associated with news stories of disasters; a theme I had examined intellectually in literature at college and beyond. It's one of the biggies, running through most of Melville, among others, and right down the middle of the great American novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
I'm an only child, albeit encompassed and generously loved by an abundance of relatives, forty-nine first cousins on the Buckley side alone. Still, I have no sibling with whom to share my orphanhood, so perhaps the experience is more acutely felt. Only children often have more intense, or at least more tightly focused, relationships with their parents than children of larger families. This was, at any rate, my experience.
I don't know that I have anything particularly useful, much less profound, to impart about the business of losing one's parents, other than this account of how it went in my case. I doubt you'll be stunned to hear that it has a somewhat dampening effect on one's general felicity and inclination to humor. I recall, on entering the vestibule of Leo P. Gallagher & Son Funeral Home the first time after Mum died, seeing a table stacked with pamphlets with titles like Losing a Loved One or The Grieving Process, illustrated with flowers and celestial sunbeams. As a satirist, which is to say someone who makes raspberries at the cosmos, my inclination is to parody: Okay, They're Dead: Deal with It or Why It's Going to Cost You $7,000 to Cremate Mummy. But standing there with my grief-stricken father, the banal suddenly didn't seem quite so silly or in need of a kick in the rear end, and (believe me) I'm a veteran chortler over Oscar Wilde's line "It would require a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell." Right after JFK was shot, Mary McGrory said to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "We'll never laugh again," to which Moynihan responded, "Mary, we'll laugh again, but we'll never be young again."
It occurs to me that Moynihan's reply brushes up against the nut of the orphanhood thing (as my former boss George H. W. Bush might put it)—namely, the accompanying realization that you're next. With the death of the second parent, one steps—or is not-so-gently nudged—across the threshold into the Green Room to the river Styx.
One of my early memories, age five, is of being in bed with my parents and being awoken in the middle of the night by the ringing of the phone. A great commotion of grown-ups followed: Mum going down to make coffee, Pup hunched over the phone, speaking in grave, urgent tones. Of course, I found it all exciting and eventful and hoped it would involve—with any luck—a reprieve from school that day. "What is it?" I asked Mum. "Pup's father has died, darling." Apart from being in the car when she drove over the family cocker spaniel, this was my first brush with death. Then, an even half century later, the phone rang again with the news that my father had died.
In the Zen koan, the noble lord sends word throughout the land, offering a huge reward to anyone who can distill for him in poetry the definition of happiness. (This was in the days before Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?) A monk duly shuffled in and handed the nobleman a poem that read, in its entirety: Grandfather diesFather diesSon dies.
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