Rabbi Janet Marder

April 15, 2009

The Winter is Past: Pesach Yizkor 5769

Pat was a sophomore at Vassar, tall and stunning, with a regal air; the daughter of one of the wealthiest families in Canada . Bill was a junior at Yale, a star on the debating team, with an impressive vocabulary and a patrician air; he’d grown up pampered on the family estate in Sharon , Connecticut . Pat’s suitemate was Bill’s sister, Trish, who set the two of them up on a blind date. Pat was not quite ready when Bill arrived to pick her up for their first date. “I offered to paint her fingernails,” he later wrote. “And she immediately extended her hand.” Some months later, he proposed.

Here’s how Pat always told the story: she was playing bridge one evening, and during a break in the game, Bill took her aside and asked her to marry him. Pat said, “Bill, three other men have asked me the same question. I said no to them, but I’m saying yes to you. Now, may I go back to my bridge game?” (In other versions, Pat was playing canasta and had turned down as many as eight previous suitors.)

The marriage of William F. Buckley and Patricia Taylor struck everyone who knew them as a union of opposites They were a striking pair: Bill, the leading intellectual of the conservative movement, author of 55 books, fiction and non-fiction --lecturer and political ideologue; Pat, a glamorous socialite and philanthropist who ran with a fashionable New York crowd – “Auntie Mame and the Absent-Minded professor, Pericles and Cleopatra,” as one wrier put it.

Both were formidable personalities, equally smart, funny and opinionated, famously strong-willed and sharp-tongued. Bill’s public feuds are well-known; he could eviscerate an enemy with a viciously well-chosen insult. “[Pat] blurted out anything she felt like blurting out,” said one of her friends. “If she loved you, she loved you madly. If she hated you, look out.”

As you might have predicted, their union was a stormy one, and everyone around them got drenched. Their only child, the writer Christopher Buckley, says that his mom and dad often infuriated each other. He told a journalist, “I was the person in the middle. We clashed often. I was sort of tapped as a go-between marriage counselor. [My dad would say] ‘You won’t believe what your mother’s done now.”

There were other problems – over the years Pat’s drinking became more and more problematic. These were “two very complex people,” says Christopher. “They were not your typical mom and dad. This is not Ozzie and Harriet. They were William F. and Pat Buckley. The phrase ‘larger than life’ doesn’t [half] cover it.”

The marriage of these two titanic figures often wasn’t pretty, and it was rarely lovey-dovey. And yet the affection between them was intense and enduring. They were deeply attuned to each other – “mentally, morally, politically…romantically.” Pat took good care of her man. Christopher says, “Even when she wasn’t speaking to my dad, which was a lot of the time, [when he went on a trip] she would pack his bags.” She was six feet tall, but she always wore flats, so as not to tower over Bill. They always called each other by the same nickname – “Ducky.” They were married for 57 years.

Patricia Buckley died of septic poisoning at the age of 80, on April 15, 2007, two years ago today. Henry Kissinger gave the main eulogy. In it he paid tribute to her marriage, which he called “one of the great love stories of our time. The combination of Pat and Bill,” he said, “brought about a binary reaction that perhaps only a nuclear physicist could explain.”

Bill Buckley was too distraught to speak at his wife’s funeral. Instead his eulogy was printed in the program. In it, he quoted a condolence letter he’d received from an acquaintance: “I am a confirmed nonbeliever, but for once I would like to be mistaken, and hope that, for you, this is not good-bye, but hasta luego.”  Buckley wrote in response, “No alternative thought would make continuing in life, for me, tolerable.”

In the period after his wife’s death, friends who had not seen Bill for a while were shocked by his appearance. “I couldn’t believe the state he was in—really like a derelict,” recalls one. They worried about Bill, who had health problems of his own – diabetes and emphysema. Nancy Reagan commented in those days, “I don’t know how he can go on without [Pat]. She ran his life, really. And he let her. He wanted her to.”

Bill Buckley lived ten months after his wife passed away. In February 2008 he collapsed at his home in Connecticut and died. Christopher Buckley gave the only eulogy at his funeral. He quoted Hamlet -- “I shall not look upon his like again.” He called his father “the world’s coolest mentor.” And he concluded: “This afternoon I’ll make one last trip up there [to Stamford ] to bury him.… I shall place in his coffin his favorite rosary, the TV remote control—private joke—a jar of peanut butter, and my mother’s ashes.”

Christopher Buckley, a prolific author and columnist who is 56 years old, had resolved not to write anything about his parents. His feelings about them were complicated. He knew that he had been far from a model son, and his relationship with his mother and father was far from idyllic. He’d had his own drug problems, and got embroiled in a notorious scandal when he fathered a child out of wedlock. He broke his father’s heart by abandoning his Catholic faith.

Christopher says that he and his dad probably exchanged at least 7,000 letters and emails over the years and “it’s quite possible that over half of them involved contentions.” Christopher “often cut off contact with both parents for months on end”  [see Bob Colacello, “Mr. and Mrs. Right,” in Vanity Fair, January 2009].

 Yet not long after losing his mother and father in the same year, he sat down and wrote a memoir about them. Entitled “Losing Mum and Pup,” it’s scheduled to be published next month. The book, he says, needed to be written.

“Writing this book may have been simply a way of spending more time with my parents, before finally letting them go,” he told one journalist. “It spilled out of me. I wrote it in 40 days—no biblical association intended. This book is going to land hard in some quarters, although anyone who concludes that it’s anything but an act of love will, I think, be wrong.”

Asked if his relationship with his parents changed after their death, he said, “It never goes away, and they never go away. Your parents are your ultimate protectors, and no matter what difficulties you’re having with them when they’re alive, you can always pick up the phone and hear their voices. They provide a certain level of comfort – just knowing they’re there. They’re like fire extinguishers mounted on the wall behind glass. You know if it really comes to it, you can break the glass. And now they’re gone” [AARP Magazine, May & June, 2009].

At Yizkor we remember love in all its shades and configurations. Marriages: some of them blissful, some of them tormented; the best of them flawed -- the union of two imperfect individuals who in their years together sometimes fought, got on each other’s nerves, turned away from each other, disappointed each other time and time again.

Parents we knew for a lifetime and viewed through many different lights – sometimes with affection and respect but sometimes, perhaps often, with annoyance, irritation, sadness or dismay. Grandparents we adored who squabbled endlessly with one another; brothers and sisters who were our oldest companions and also our partners in bickering and rivalry.

At Yizkor human beings remember one another in all their human limitations. Though we’re all grown up, we cry like children whose protectors are no more.  We cry for husbands and wives – for what we had together and have lost. We cry, sometimes, for what we didn’t have, and for what never came to be. We cry for all the complicated reasons you cry when you have loved someone who now is gone.

At Pesach, especially, we mark the complications and contradictions of love – the mixture of feelings that doesn’t lessen the power of the loss. Pesach is the holiday when we dip maror into charoset, tasting bitter and sweet together, because the two are inseparable in any life that goes on long enough.

Pesach is the holiday when we read Shir HaShirim, the Song of Songs, the Bible’s great poem that is about being in love, and also yearning for love, and searching for love, and desire unfulfilled.

The Song of Songs is beautiful and tender, with exquisite moments of intimacy and passion. But like all love affairs, it is also full of misunderstandings and missed opportunities. The two lovers unite only to come apart; they look for one another in the dark and cannot always reconnect.

And so it is with those who mourn. We remember the moments of closeness that were beautiful and good, along with the times we snapped at someone we loved, or brushed them off or let them down, or were just too busy for them. We remember those who couldn’t always give us what we needed; the hurt feelings and the missed connections and the distances that sometimes grew between us.

On Pesach, festival of contradictions, we celebrate our freedom, knowing that we are never really free; for to be human is to be tied to others – bound to them in joy and sorrow, in tenderness and care, in faithfulness and obligation, in regret and grief and guilt. We are tied forever to the people we miss today. As Christopher Buckley said, they never go away.

Buckley, who struggled all his life with his parents, found some peace in writing about them and their tumultuous marriage, in giving vent to the surprising grief he felt at losing them. The act of remembering, done right, can help to heal us.

So we are here, on this beautiful spring morning, to rejoice at the earth’s liberation from winter, and to work for our own liberation from the ache of loss.

We may think of the ones we love forever, but it doesn’t have to hurt forever. Remembrance can be gentle – gentle on ourselves, and gentle on them. In remembrance is the release of tears and feelings long locked inside us. Memory can lead to laughter; what once annoyed us can now become quirky and funny – even endearing. Memory can lead to understanding, and forgiveness, and the letting go of pain.

So let us give thanks for great romances and for devoted partners who also had their share of problems; for parents who were everything we needed them to be, and for those who simply did the best they could; for the complicated individuals we miss so much today.  With grateful hearts we celebrate them all; with gentle hearts we embrace them in their flawed humanity, which is ours, as well.  We give thanks for love, in all its imperfection, for love is the greatest blessing we will ever know.

Let there be an end to pain. Let the healing begin.

“For lo the winter is past, the rains are over and gone. The blossoms appear in the land; the time of singing has come.”