I always felt some of Bill Buckley’s best columns were his obituaries. When a friend or someone he admired died, Bill’s essay would evoke the person’s good nature and distinctiveness. He also managed to capture a person’s eccentricities. Consider his obit this past fall for Norman Mailer:
“This initiative brought him and his wife to our house in Stamford, Connecticut, and I took him out on my 36-foot sailboat. He could not believe it when I turned the wheel over to him, pointing out a course to the end of the harbor. It was very cold by the time we had finished dinner, but he ordered his wife Jeannie to the back of his motorcycle, and they zoomed off to Brooklyn.”
There have been some wonderful obits, but I doubt that anyone can resurrect Bill’s spirit the way he could bring about the memory of others. I will miss him.
