LOSING MUM AND PUP, by Christopher Buckley. Twelve; 251 pages; $24.99.

Just before they closed William F. Buckley, Jr.’s coffin, his son Christopher put in a few things: His father’s rosary, a jar of peanut butter, the TV remote control that nobody else could ever commandeer, and a Chinese lacquer box that held the ashes of Patricia Buckley, so they could be together for eternity.

Pat and Bill Buckley died within 10 months of each other. Both had the sort of churning, larger- than-life personalities that undoubtedly made oxygen rather hard to come by for anybody else in the room, and made their deaths seem stunningly unlikely.

Christopher Buckley’s Losing Mum and Pup is part of a genre that might be called the therapeutic memoir, if that isn’t redundant. In many respects, it’s a surprising book, because Buckley doesn’t particularly go for sentiment; as he sat at his mother’s deathbed, he said “I forgive you,” and as you move through the book, that seems an appropriate response. His mother was, at times, impossible — a fantasist, an expert picker of fights.

Of his father, Buckley is less ambivalent, more affectionate, even though he was every bit as imperious as his wife. At the end, William F. Buckley was deathly ill from emphysema, heart trouble, and quantities of self-administered drugs, that, says his son, would have given Hunter S. Thompson pause.

There was also what seems to have been the creeping edge of dementia. One night, Christopher Buckley entered his father’s bedroom to discover that the thermostat had been set to a frigid 52, and his father was trying to get warmer by playing with the TV remote.

Despondent over the death of his wife and often unable to function at his accustomed high level, the elder Buckley contemplated suicide and, but for his ardent Catholicism, might have done it. With all that, when he sat down in front of a keyboard, the hobbling of age slipped away and the words flowed.

Christopher Buckley’s own words flow rather nicely too. The book reads as if it was written in a couple of week or so, and his father would be happy to know that the speed doesn’t negatively impact the quality of the sentences.

At the end of an exhausting year spent trying to care for geriatric parents who didn’t really want to be taken care of, Christopher Buckley says that the only solid piece of advice he can offer is this: Make sure your parents pre-negotiate their funeral expenses. When it came time to choose a coffin for his father, Buckley was stunned to discover that funeral homes charge extra for handles.

Where is Jessica Mitford when you need her?

William F. Buckley Jr. wrote 55 books, and his son is clearly in awe of his work ethic. “Industry is the enemy of melancholy” Buckley used to say. If the incessant activity accentuated a certain glibness — Buckley used to boast that he could write a column in five minutes, as if that was something to be proud of — it’s fair to say that none of those books will be anywhere near as important as the fact that Buckley served as the spark plug for the conservative dominance of our politics that lasted for over 30 years. (I speak of it in the past tense with the same weariness with which Christopher Buckley speaks of his exhausting parents.)

But you didn’t have to agree with William F. Buckley’s politics to find his urbanity and sense of joyous possibilities about life admirable, at least when he wasn’t calling Gore Vidal a “fag.” Certainly, his temperament was closer to FDR or JFK than it was to the morbid religiosity that came to permeate the politics Buckley did so much to define.

Perhaps that’s why Christopher Buckley seems a little shy of his father’s conservatism, and is definitely shy about his father’s High Church Catholicism, although it seems to me that the latter formed the foundation of the former.

The book is open, but only up to a point. Buckley estimates that his parents spent about one third of their 57 years of married life not speaking. Really? Well, do tell. But he doesn’t. It’s a topic Sam Tanenhaus will hopefully pursue in his upcoming biography of Buckley.

Losing Mum and Pup isn’t a declaration of independence, as so many memoirs are. Rather, it’s a mostly fond but clear-eyed remembrance of two very difficult, driven people who forged a bond and raised a smart and funny son.