The Bucket List - before there was one
August 8th, 2008 by Michael DavisMy wife and I just finished watching The Bucket List starring Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson as two cancer patients with a short time to live. They devise a Bucket List of items they want to do before their lives end - things which they would regret not having done. The movie received tepid praise from critics and was not particularly a hit with moviegoers in theaters. Death is, and has always been, a subject to avoid in polite society.
We both enjoyed The Bucket List. It wasn’t a buffoon-fest. Nor was it overly sappy - something it could easily have become.
It struck me, though, how many times I have listened to folk’s bucket lists. As a hospice chaplain for twelve years, I had opportunity to explore those lists. I remember a visit at the end of a week on Friday afternoon. The nursing home always smelled like pee or worse. It was not a favorite place to go but it was near my home and I could finish out the week with several quick visits and begin my weekend in short order. Ethel (not her real name) had a room with a window near a tree. The tree was not particularly pretty. It was just a tree. But she told me on that Friday that she liked to look at it.
Now, there was something about Ethel that I just liked. She enjoyed our visits. She was simple and plain-spoken. She was honest.
“Mike, I’m really starting to go downhill.”
“I know, Ethel. By the way, do you mean that you think you’re getting nearer to dying?”
“Yeah…. I think my time’s getting near. And, I don’t know what to do?”
“What do you mean? Is there something you want to do or need to do?”
“Yeah. You see that tree? It reminds me of the trees in East Texas. I’d love to go back there just one more time.”
“Where in East Texas would you go?”
“I’d go to Tyler.”
“And what would you do there?”
“I just want to sit under a big old tree and put my bare feet in the green grass. I always used to love to do that as a little girl and I want to do it again.”
“If I could arrange for you and I and a nurse and some of your family to go, would you want to go?”
“I’d love to. But I might not make it.”
“Ethel, if you don’t make it and you’re in the back seat of my car, the nurse will be with you and I’ll just keep on driving ’til we get back here. Then we’ll take care of the other stuff.”
“Could we really do that?”
“I think so. I just have to find a nurse to go with us and we’ll have to get permission from your family. Other than that, I think we could work it out.”
I left her bedside utterly elated, hopeful that we might be able to fulfill someone’s honest-to-goodness, real-life bucket list. Sadly, family was worried she might die on the way, even though arrangements were made and everything could be taken care of. They just couldn’t see her going to Tyler, even though she would be made entirely comfortable. So they chose not to let her go.
Just last week I heard another similar bucket list. Again, it was to go back to East Texas (what the heck is it with East Texas, anyway?). Again, I knew it would never happen.
Why is it that doctors and families will insist that patients fight a losing battle for three months in utter agony rather than live pain-free for three days in the fulfillment of a dream? Maybe that’s the reason the big-screen version of The Bucket List wasn’t the blockbuster that it might have been: because our own lists and values are so small, pathetic, and trivial. More to the point, our bucket lists as passed on to our families are as follows:
- Live at any cost
- Do nothing to rock the status quo
- Have no dreams when you get sick
I’ve always been angry that Ethel didn’t get her trip. Why didn’t she? Who gave her family the right to rob her of this?
The thing about a Bucket List is that you have to choose to live it. As we age, our bucket lists tend to winnow down. The bucket lists of most of the elderly do not include jumping out of an airplane or driving a Shelby Mustang, as in the movie. For most elderly it breaks down to things like placing bare feet in green grass under a large shade tree in Tyler, Texas. We do them no favors by robbing them of their bucket lists. We do ourselves no favors by robbing them of their bucket lists. Our children see how we treat the lists of our own kin.
And, what’s on your bucket list?