A READER’S BUCKET LIST

by Deborah Elliott-Upton

In everyone’s life there are many stories we’re told. We may call them anecdotes1, wishful thinking or out-and-out falsehoods. Sometimes we hear them at family gatherings during the holidays, sometimes read about them in diaries and sometimes they only come to light at funerals. The ultimate short story of someone’s life is their obituary.

The recent deaths in the entertainment world of Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson touched us all in ways we may not have realized until after their deaths or certainly not until their tributes have been presented in publications and TV screens. You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.

Remember somewhere in time where a teacher instructed us to compose our own obituary? Of course, we were young and our dreams big. Everyone was President, a movie star or at least a CEO. No one wrote they were destined to be laid off from a big corporation going bankrupt. No one had ended up living on the streets. No one had turned to a life of crime.

When I found myself reading the obituaries more often, I wondered why, and it hit me perhaps because people my age and younger were actually dying and I no longer could consider myself bulletproof. I guess that comes with maturity, which I like a lot better than saying that it’s because I’m getting older. My maternal grandfather used to say he didn’t mind getting older because it sure as hell beat the alternative. The good die young? Hmm, maybe that’s why I’m still kicking.

Movies like “The Bucket List” do well at the box office because all of us have things we’d like to do before we die and some discover we might need to get started before it’s too late. So, I’m wondering what would be on a reader’s bucket list? Are there certain books we’d want to have read before we die? Is there a magic number that says, “This is enough!”? Should we all write Our Story to leave behind as a legacy?

Maybe. Maybe not. Personally, I can’t put a cap on the number or titles of books I’d want to have finished. Every day more appear on the shelves and on the web and it seems they find their way into my hands. Should I write my personal odyssey? I’m not sure anyone would care. I haven’t climbed Mt. Everest, saved someone’s life, or witnessed a famous (or even not-so-famous) crime.

That doesn’t make my life any less worthwhile than another’s, but it may be relatively a boring tale.

At this time of my life, I find I have more questions than answers. What makes one person’s story important enough to write down? What would be critical for others to know about us in an obituary? Is where we were born, went to school, or to the job we did more important than how we lived? And yet that is rarely addressed in an obituary. Sure, we were loved and will be missed. (I’ve read that often in obituaries.) Be warned: I am about to do an impression of Andy Rooney: So, is there ever anybody who dies that we didn’t love and won’t miss? Of course there is, but we can’t say that.

On my death-bed, I will probably wish I’d done many more things with the time I’d been given. My family and friends will know I needed more time to do everything on my list. (It is quite lengthy still because I keep adding to it.)

We all touch each other in so many ways. It is my wish that your time spent with us at Criminal Brief is worthy.

1. anecdote (noun) 1. A short entertaining story about a real incident or person. 2. An account regarded as unreliable or as being hearsay. — DERIVATIVES anecdotal (adjective) anecdotalist (noun) anecdotally (adverb) ORIGIN from Greek anekdota “things unpublished”. [↩]