What should we make of Losing Mum and Pup, Christopher Buckley’s memoir of the that brief, less than a year-long period when both of his brilliant, charismatic parents fell ill and died? It is warm, affectionate, respectful, appropriately laudatory, and often quite moving. But it is also frank to point of indiscretion (some say past the point of indiscretion) in discussing the indignities inflicted (mostly on his parents, some on him) by their encroaching infirmities. And sometimes the memoir is shocking. Here Buckley talks about his mother’s last moments:
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.”
It sounded, even at the time, like a terribly presumptuous statement. But it needed to be said. She would never have asked for forgiveness herself, even in extremis. She was far too proud. Only once or twice, when she had been truly awful, did she apologize. Generally, she was defiant — almost magnificently so — when her demons slipped their leash. My wise wife, Lucy, has a 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 hers.
Reading that passage, one feels as though Buckley has pulled aside a curtain to reveal –well, you don’t know exactly what he’s showing us, but it looks like there be dragons there.
“The recounting of such tales tells us more about the son than the parents,’’ wrote my friend James Rosen in a review for The Washington Post. “It is as if Christopher, having said all the right things at the memorials he dutifully organized, now wants to show the world his parents at their very worst. He acknowledges having “spent a good deal of my life . . . trying to measure up to my father”; that he felt wounded by his father’s inability in recent years “to compliment something I’d written, unless it was about him”; and that Buckley’s extraordinary speed in writing, in contrast with the son’s hard labor, once led Christopher to gaze upon “the .22-caliber rifle mounted on the wall, wondering if I could get the barrel in my mouth and pull the trigger with my big toe.” Father, a devout Catholic, and son, a defiant agnostic, waged their “own Hundred Years’ War over the matter of faith” and exchanged, by Christopher’s count, over 3,000 contentious letters and e-mails. And when the aged Buckley abruptly announced he had something important to disclose, the son’s anxious first thought, he confides, was: “You’re leaving all your money to National Review?” Avid followers of the Buckleys will recall even more points of contention than Christopher enumerates. Christopher Buckley admits that his own sins “are manifold and blushful, but callousness [is] not among them.” Readers may beg to differ. ‘’
Like James, I think there’s some sort of emotional unburdening going on here, something that stops short of conscious score-settling but that kind of tailgates it (remember: For my sake, more than hers.) It doesn’t help that the author is frequently cute and coy about revealing sad and painful details; twice he talks about his father’s bladder control problems by saying “He is a river to his people.’’ Twice! A humorist has to be awfully proud of his cleverness to repeat a line. Still, here’s the thing: Chris Buckley is a writer, and what writers do is write, and usually the less conscience and decorum and discretion has to do with it, the better. Being surprised at what he’s done is like being surprised your dog has bitten a beloved dinner guest. And as sad as it is to bear witness to the decay of witty, glamorous, brilliant people we have admired, it is a painfully efficient way to remind those of us still living to seize the day.