Amid the monumental solemnity of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Temple of Dendur, Pat Buckley was memorialized yesterday for her near regal sense of style, her fund-raising prowess, and her devotion to the men in her life — the writers William Buckley and Christopher Buckley.

Longtime friend Kenneth Lane, a jewelry designer, compared Buckley to the long-ruling female pharaoh of Egypt’s 18th dynasty, Hatshepsut, while a former secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, called her “a permanent aspect of my life whom God in his wisdom had put into my life, sui generis.”

“She didn’t just enter a room,” a former New York City commissioner of cultural affairs, Schuyler Chapin, said, “she took possession of it.”

At nearly 6-feet tall, this may have been somewhat easier for Buckley than for others, but it was her perfervid labors on behalf of her chosen causes, especially the Met’s Costume Institute and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital, that set her apart in New York society.

Although William Buckley did not speak — he sat in the front row of the audience alongside his son, Christopher — he did provide for the program a brief, deeply felt essay on his more than half-century with the former Patricia Taylor, a Canadian whom he met when she was a Vassar co-ed and roommate of his sister, Trish.

The Buckleys’ life together was frenetic and full of incident and friends, punctuated by Mr. Buckley ‘s periodic “Guess what, ducky?” — the inevitable prelude, she wrote in Condé Nast Traveler in 1988, to some impulsive activity, such as taking up ski-gliding or a cruise to Pitcairn Island.

“She was more Auntie Mame than someone who would teach you to knit or bake pies,” her granddaughter, Caitlin Buckley, said.

But Pat Buckley was famously proud of being labeled a housewife, and there was the little matter of playing hostess while her husband led the fledgling conservative movement and published National Review. Mr. Buckley recalled in his essay that his wife always worried that he would overextend himself.

“She opposed the founding of National Review, my signing up with a lecture agency, my nonfiction books, and then my fiction books, my contract to write a weekly column, the projected winter in Switzerland, my decision to run for mayor of New York,” Mr. Buckley wrote in his essay. “Yet once those enterprises were undertaken, she participated enthusiastically.”

(In an April interview with the New York Observer, she called Mr. Buckley’s 1965 run for mayor his “summer of madness.” “You want to know what excites me?” she said. “Planting irises.”)

The Reverend George Rutler of the Church of Our Savior in Manhattan praised Buckley’s fashion sense and interior decoration. “Good taste won’t get you into heaven,” he said. “But it will ease the adjustment.”

Among the approximately 400 people who turned out to celebrate Buckley’s life were Anna Wintour, Blaine Trump, Lally Weymouth, George Will, Mica Ertegun, Shirley Lord Rosenthal, and Aileen Mehle.

Another old Buckley friend, Reinaldo Herrera, recalled his excitement at discovering that they shared a favorite English poet, Ernest Dowson, author of the poem ” Vitae Summa Brevis,” source of the lines, “They are not long, the days of wine and roses / Out of a misty dream / Our path emerges for a while, then closes / Within a dream.”

Dowson’s days were indeed not long, as he died at 33. But Pat Buckley’s days, which ended April 15, stretched for 80 years, and included roses and irises and a mainstay of her hospitality, the bull shot — beef broth and vodka, served copiously after the memorial.