STEVE LOVE

Author,  Award-Winning Journalist and Proud Oklahoman

Bucky Buck and His Mother Bonnie Lee Thaxton, Together in Prayerful Contemplation

May can be an unkind month, one when the tiny flowers that dot Oklahoma’s prairies die too soon. Osage writer John Joseph Mathews once suggested that their fallen petals looked as if the “gods had left confetti.” Another writer, David Grann, borrowed the Mathews image for what might seem too gentle an opening to Killers of the Flower Moon, his book about what once had happened to the Osage people in the 1920s.

Grann explains that the smallest plants “beneath an unnervingly large moon” are overshadowed by taller ones in the month of May. “The necks of the smaller flowers break and their petals flutter away, and before long they are buried underground.” To the Osage, and to other Native Americans, this is “the time of the flower-killing moon.”

Also borrowing upon and extrapolating from this image, I find nature can feel unkind when it is only taking its course. May once again has left the shadow of death. Three years ago today—May 8, 2018—my friend Douglas “Bucky” Buck died at 72. Now, in reversal of the order in which these things should occur, his mother, Bonnie Lee Thaxton, is gone. She died May 3 at age 97, with Bucky’s daughter Melissa Buck Gillman at her side. Bucky should have been there but would have given thanks that Missy was and that grandson Dempsey had recently visited his great grandma.

I did not truly know Bucky’s mother, as I knew the mothers of other friends. I was particularly close to those of Charles Dugger and KB Berry, mothers who did not seem to mind that I lived at their homes as much as I did at my own. Our small town in northeastern Oklahoma could be like that, an earlier and true version of an African proverb which Hillary Rodham Clinton once borrowed for her book It Takes a Village.

If I lived at the Dugger’s and, literally, at the Berry’s for one summer, Bonnie always had the welcome Hungry Boys mat out, especially for KB, Bucky’s best friend forever before anyone realized that BFF would become an acronym for this in the age of social media. There are stories in my Football, Fast Friends, and Small Towns: A Memoir from a Broken Oklahoma Heart illustrative of Bonnie’s unflappability when it came to feeding surprise dinner guests and even dealing with occasional accidental gunfire in the house.

Missy Buck Gillman may have summed up her grandmother in a Facebook entry posted with a photo of her grandma. It read: “Oh this face! She may have looked sweet but if you made her mad you better start running. Her stink eye oftentimes was enough for me to straighten up. Oh how I will miss seeing the face.”

When Missy posted the funeral arrangements for her grandmother, a proud member, like son Bucky, of the Delaware Tribe (corrected at suggestion of Bonnie Jo Griffith: see comments), she referred to the fact that there was to be a “Traditional Delaware Wake” from 5 p.m. Wednesday (May 5) to 9 a.m. Thursday (May 6), with the funeral service to follow at 10 a.m., all of it at Stumpff Funeral Home in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. This sent me in search of Traditional Delaware Wake details.

I found more than I could handle in a 1984 piece titled “Lenape Funeral Customs” by Nora Thompson Dean. It was part of The Lenape [Delaware] Indian: A Symposium, Seton Hall Publications No. 7, 1984, by Herbert Kraft.

Not sure how closely Bonnie’s wake adhered to the traditions of which there are many—it is noted there have been changes over the years in the traditions—but I can confirm that just as the Delaware know how to live, they also know how to die. Maybe that is what Bucky meant when he told me he would leave the details of his death and burial to others. He was a proud and steadfast Delaware, a dancer at pow-wows and believer in passing on Delaware traditions to his beloved grandson Dempsey early in life and bequeathing him his Delaware regalia in the hope that Dempsey would also dance.

On the third anniversary of Bucky’s death—even the great linebacker who tackled everything head-on couldn’t beat cancer forever—I would have been thinking of him even if Bonnie shortly after entering hospice care. There is always reincarnation.

“Sometimes,” Nora Thompson Dean wrote, “a Lenape is reincarnated; not everyone of course, but sometimes one does come  back. The older people pay special attention to the earlobes of a newborn baby, looking for an indentation which makes them seem like they had been pierced before. They will watch such a person all during childhood to see if it is really true.” (Take note, Demp, if one day you are a father; check those earlobes.)

I have my doubts about reincarnation, even though I think the world would do well to have a new Buck, with Bucky’s big heart and his mother’s unforgettable stink eye. The most comforting thing I learned about the Traditional Delaware Wake is that even when it is over the next morning and burial occurs, that does not mean it is over. “We Lenape people hold our departed people in mind for a long time,” assured Dean, who went on to tell of meeting a Delaware man who had been told by a white doctor that he should consider seeing a psychiatrist because after two years he was still grieving the death of his brother. The doctor considered this “abnormal behavior” after this period of time

In which case, I had better call a psychiatrist for an appointment, because each day as I walk for five miles I grieve the loss of Bucky and talk to him as if he were still with me. As I mention in my memoir, I walk on a path around and in the sprawling parking lot of a megachurch. Anyone who sees me, lips moving but no one in sight to respond, probably thinks I’ve lost it. And they would be right. I have lost it. I have lost Bucky.

It is probably a character defect, my glass half-empty personality, or age but I think about yesterday more than today and don’t even know if there will be a tomorrow. I think of and am filled by memories of Bucky—of the sports we played, the long absences between high school class reunions as we went about our lives, the deep renewal of our friendship in the latter years of Bucky’s life, and his too-soon, so-sad ending. Now, I will think about Bonnie Lee, too, and something Missy wrote following her death: “I know my Daddy and Grandma Bonnie are singing [Alison Krauss’ I’ll Fly Away] on high right now. Oh what a reunion it must have been, for my Grandma Bonnie and all her loved ones.”