Is Death On Your “Bucket List”?

A Minnesota Woman’s Death Could Be a Tragedy — Or Sound Life Management

Gail Mattson was on her “dream adventure” when she got killed. Does making a Bucket List suggest you’re willing and ready to die pursuing it?

We all did it when we were school kids. Most of us still do it at work as adults: Put off that big report or project until the last minute. Then scramble to do anything that meets the requirements but doesn’t come close to quality — all in a transparent and half-assed effort to beat the deadline for handing it to the teacher.

Inexplicably, we continue to procrastinate as our precious, irreplaceable time on Earth ends entirely then, after retiring, slap together some ideas we saw on TV to fight boredom. More oddly, we call it a “Bucket List”.

The Bucket List became most recently popular after a film of the same name based on a nonsensical 18th-century cliché for dying, “kick the bucket”. It’s a collection of things you ostensibly want to do before you die. After watching the film, I wondered how shallow the terminally-ill main characters’ lives were to want things like that more than anything: skydive, race cars, fly over the North Pole, eat dinner at Chèvre d’Or, see the Taj Mahal and Mount Everest, ride motorcycles on the Great Wall of China, and go on an African safari (a popular choice as you will soon learn).

After all our lives, that’s it? Are we too busy putting off things we really want…