Losing Mum and Pup

This is a memoir by Christopher Buckley about losing his parents,Pat and William F. Buckley, both in the same year. I actually liked it, it does a good job of recognising their awfulness but still loving them in spite of it all. So on one hand he was truthful about their narcissism and distance while on the other he acknowledged their good qualities. It manages to be funny and exasperated with them but still very tender. An interesting detail about Buckley was that he was a remote control hog, he had to always be in control and this extended to the remote. People would be over to watch a movie and right when the important plot point would be revealed he would switch to a documentary on another channel. When he died Christopher Buckley placed a few things in his casket with him: his rosary, a jar of peanut butter and the remote. It's only about that one year in their lives but manages to somehow radiate beyond that. It's up there with John Bayley's Elegy for Iris.

One thing he quoted from William Hazlitt that I thought quite useful when confronting death:

"Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death, is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not; this gives us no concern---why then should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?"