Before I Die, and After, Too
Monday, June 21, 2010 at 12:21AM A couple of weeks ago I went with a friend to her chemo appointment. There were a few others receiving chemo at the same time, and there was excited discussion in the treatment room—lots of it—about The Bucket List and their own bucket lists. I listened to the others talk, but didn’t contribute. For one thing, I haven’t seen the movie and I won’t, not because I have anything against it, but because if there were such a thing as a reverse bucket list—you know, a list things I’d rather die than do—watching almost any movie would be on it. And for another, I don’t have a bucket list, and as far as I know, I have no pressing need for one.
My friend has a bucket list. She hasn’t told me what’s on it except to say that it doesn’t include sky diving. Too risky, you see.
Cancer patients are encouraged, I take it, to make bucket lists as part of their therapy. A bucket list can give someone something to live for—a few dreams to keep them going through treatments that can seem worse than dying. I’m guessing that, whether for therapy or not, most people with potentially terminal illnesses think about the things they want to do before they die.
I know my husband thought about it, but it turned out that what he wanted most was to keep on living his ordinary life. It was a joyous day for him when he recovered enough from his first close brush with death to walk to the curb and carry in the garbage cans. What he really wanted was to keep on providing for his family, raising his children, and caring for his students, with maybe a summer fishing trip to Petersburg, a few visits from out-of-town relatives, and a round of golf thrown in now and then. There were two things he added to his life once he knew he would likely die from his cancer: helping with the soup kitchen and lying on the couch every evening while the rest of the family took turns reading aloud to him from the Bible. We made it, in the time we had, through the whole New Testament except for Revelation; and through Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, Judges, 1 & 2 Samuel, 1 & 2 Kings, Psalms and Isaiah in the Old Testament.
We’d talked, before his illness, of going to Norway or Slovenia to see where his grandparents had come from. We’d talked about visiting the Vietnam memorial. And we could have done any one of those things after his diagnosis if he’d wanted, because for some of the time, he was well enough to travel. But for him, the terminal diagnosis took things off his before-I-die list, and the items added were not spectacular, one-time activities, but new ordinary tasks. Tasks, now that I think about it, of discipleship.
The sermon yesterday was about believers as disciples. We’ve been recreated, we heard, to do the good works planned for us beforehand. Afterwards, my friend with the bucket list was weighing things. Discipleship or bucket list? Which one?
We all know the right answer, don’t we?
But you know what? I think she can keep her bucket list as long as she remembers that as a believer she has no looming deadline. She has no cut-off point for joyful activities. She will one day be able to celebrate the things she loves in the new creation. Although I’m sure she won’t be calling it a bucket list there.
I’m thinking that in the new creation, she might even dare to put sky-diving on the list. No risk, you see.
