Free Losing Mum and Pup by Christopher Buckley Page A

established. Nothing more was said on the subject of smoking.
    Then, years later, poking through his desk drawers in his study in Stamford—don’t ask; I’ve always been a sneaky little bastard—I
     found a copy of a letter he had written to Father Leo, my headmaster at Portsmouth, inquiring if my inexplicable insistence
     on attending summer school to learn Greek was due to—as he put it—“an amorous dalliance” (translation: homosexual) with another
     boy. I was dumbstruck reading this. God only knows what poor old Father Leo must have thought. Had he instigated discreet
     inquiries among the other monks?
Is young Buckley, um, doing anything… out of the normal these days?
I draw from this pathetic tale two lessons: Leave revenge to the professionals, and don’t go poking about in other people’s
     correspondence—you might not like what you find.
    I continued my idiotic, willful juvenile delinquency and smoked on and off until September 14, 1988, when, after three days
     at the bedside of a friend dying of lung cancer (“He has twelve tumors in his lungs the size of golf balls,” the doctor told
     us), I simply stopped. It was as if a toggle switch had forever clicked to the off position. Now Pup was writing to tell me
     that his beloved sister Jane had finally been killed by the cigarettes she’d smoked. As I stared blearily at the e-mail, the
     awful thought went through my mind that something like this lay in wait for Pup, too.
    I loved Jane—everyone did. But I didn’t have it in me—this crowded, deathful spring—to turn around and get back on a plane
     and fly three thousand miles to another funeral. I just didn’t. So I e-mailed my love and condolences to Pup and his brothers
     and sisters—there were ten of them, originally; now six remained—and to my cousins, Jane’s six wonderful children. And then
     unpacked.
    A day or so later, there was another e-mail from Pup—they were getting increasingly indecipherable—referring casually (I felt)
     to the fact that he would miss Jane’s funeral because he had to go to Washington, D.C., to accept an award. I thought,
Huh?
It wasn’t the Nobel Peace Prize, but some lifetime anticommunism award. (I don’t mean any disrespect.) I mused on this as
     I dragged myself up steep alpine slopes, avoiding sheep dip. I kept thinking,
Pup… skipping your sister’s funeral? To pick up another award?
    By now, Pup had more awards than have been given out in the entire history of the Olympics; more honorary degrees than Erasmus;
     more medallions than the entire New York City taxi fleet; more… well, you get the point. He’d received about every honor there
     is, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and—finally—an honorary degree from Mother Yale. But not to attend Jane’s
     funeral… for this? I tried to put it out of my mind. I’d come to the lush Valais and its loamy, ovine pastures to rejuvenate,
     not recriminate; and I chided myself that, having myself declined the bother of getting on a plane to fly back for the funeral,
     I was hardly in a position to tsk-tsk.
Still.
A voice within me kept noodging,
Dude—it’s your sister’s funeral
! I e-mailed him to the effect,
Pup, are you sure about this?
He e-mailed back that he was attending the dinner in Sharon the night before the funeral with all the Buckleys and it was
     fine that he wouldn’t be at the actual funeral. It was a “non-issue.” This was one of Pup’s favorite practical formulations:
It’s a non-issue.
    I shrugged, there being nothing much further to say, and wheezed myself up the next mountainside. On these climbs, I was an
     object of curiosity to the marmots, who would pop up out of holes and make high-pitched noises at me and then disappear. The
     sun shone, the sky was cerulean, the air like Perrier. It was glorious.
    Pup’s e-mails over the following days became increasingly incoherent, eventually to the point of near complete inscrutability.
     I e-mailed Danny,