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Parting Words  

We’re told that the father once exhibited tearful gratitude at the son’s willingness to disrupt his own life to perform some caregiving, before pulling himself up and adding, “Well, I’d do the same for you.” The son’s response? “I smiled and thought, Oh no, you wouldn’t.”

William F. Buckley’s physical decline seems to have been, in its way, as prodigious as all the activity and achievements preceding it. Emphysema was his principal difficulty, and Christopher Buckley, author of the satiric novel “Thank You for Smoking” (1994), does not skimp on the ravages of all his father’s ailments. We witness his “sort of mad-professor look,” his pill-popping, his habit of uninhibited urination upon opening the car door. During one hospitalization “the most articulate man in America was speaking gibberish”; when back home he mistook the DVD player for a thermostat.

The question becomes not so much whether the reader should be spared all this, but whether the subject might be. Is this johnny-gowned indignity really necessary? Christopher Buckley himself admits preferring the words “natural causes” and “after a long illness” to the more brutal “infection” for the obituary he composed for his elegant mother.

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