[Sitting at his mother's deathbed]: I’d brought with me a pocket copy of the book of Ecclesiastes. A line in “Moby-Dick” lodged in my mind long ago: “The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe.” I grabbed it off my bookshelf on the way here, figuring that a little fine-hammered steel would probably be a good thing to have on this trip. I’m no longer a believer, but I haven’t quite reached the point of reading aloud from Christopher Hitchens’s “God Is Not Great” at deathbeds of loved ones.
Pup stood, holding onto the edge of his desk for support, and began to dictate the last chapter of his memoirs about Barry Goldwater.
“The years ahead were, by the standards of Barry Goldwater, unhurried. . . .”
What amazed me, and still does now, was how fluent it was. Rereading the final chapter in the recently published book, it’s remarkable how little changed it is from what issued from Pup’s oxygen-deprived blue lips that rainy morning in his study. His mind was a still brightly burning fire deep within the wreckage of his body. He made hardly any self-corrections as he spoke. The words came out punctuated and paragraphed. And fast. My fingers scuttled across the keyboard like crabs. In less than 10 minutes, we were on the last paragraph of the last book he would complete.
“And that was that. No one else comes to mind who sustained for so long a comparable reputation for candor and courage. Over the years, if active in the political community, one comes across rejected aspirants for the presidency. But even in that rare company Goldwater, whether initiating a call from the South Pole to my wife or puddle-jumping the Grand Canyon for his friends, was unique, and will forever remain so.”
My eyes misted up as I typed. I said, “It’s beautiful, Pup.” I was, for the 1,000th time in my life, in awe of him.I think about them every day. Orphanhood proceeds, tanned — as Leon Wieseltier hoped — and otherwise. It comes in waves. One moment you’re doing fine, living your life, even perhaps feeling some sort of primal sense of liberation — I can stay out as late as I want, and I don’t have to make my bed! Then in the next instant, boom, there it is. It has various ways of presenting, as doctors say of disease.
Sometimes it comes in the form of a black hole inside you, sucking the rest of you into it; at other times it is a sense of disconnection, as if you had been holding your mother’s hand in a crowd and suddenly she let go.The summer after Pup died, I got a midnight call with the news that my friend Rust Hills, the editor and writer, had died. Rust was a great admirer of Montaigne. I thumbed through my copy of the “Essays” and found this: “The ceaseless labor of your life is to build the house of death.” It’s probably too downbeat a sentiment by American smiley-face standards to make it onto a refrigerator magnet, but . . . pas mal. You want to be able, when the end comes, to look the Reaper right in the eye and say, “Oh, puh-leeze.” I’m sure that’s how Mum did it. She’d have added, “And what, pray, is that preposterous costume supposed to indicate?”
