Kicking the Bucket (List): A Meditation on Preparing to Die While Learning to Live

​Nevertheless, one afternoon my close friend and roommate at the time offered me a piece of advice I didn’t hate. The idea felt refreshing—more playful than prescriptive—and a welcome break from the steady stream of sanctimonious attempts to micromanage my life and diagnosis. “You should make a bucket list, and we can try to make those things happen,” she suggested, with enthusiasm, as if for once we were talking about ambition rather than just survival.

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Lately—made worse by the merciless cold of this endless month—I’ve been existing rather than living. My thoughts lean forward, toward endings, toward all that may remain unfinished. I grieve a future I might never inhabit, and in doing so, I abandon the present, where my body still stands.

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I have never cared for bucket lists. Like New Year’s resolutions, they impose a quiet tyranny, turning desire into duty. They linger overhead, heavy with expectation, threatening collapse at the first sign of failure.

Others had suggested bucket lists to me before. The idea had been tossed around my hospital room by nurses and visitors, and at times even drifted through my own mind. However, my friend’s proposal was different. It summoned joyful memories of when life felt more expansive rather than fragile and made me want to reclaim that feeling before my time was up. The list no longer felt like a ledger of unmet goals, but an act of devotion to myself, both to my happiness and well-being.

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I scribbled a few ideas on a loose page torn from one of my school notebooks and handed her the list: have a movie night with my roommates, go out to dinner with friends, write more. She read it and laughed.

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“This isn’t a bucket list,” she said. “It’s just a list of things you could do any day. A bucket list has big-ticket items, like eating ramen in Japan or jumping out of a plane.”

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I laughed too. I knew what a traditional bucket list was supposed to look like and that I hadn’t come close in my first attempt.

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I rewrote the list to include long-distance travel to Japan and Hawaii. I searched the internet for inspiration because, honestly, the reason I’d landed on such ordinary plans was simple: they were the only things that came to mind, and they were already proven to make me happy. I had to strain to make the list more extreme, and over time I began to notice that the so-called big-ticket items stirred more anxiety than joy.

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The simple plans that involved being present with the people I love felt truer to how I actually wanted to spend my time and were the truest expression of what I was afraid of losing.

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This Sunday, February 1, marks my second “Tumor-versary”—the day I entered the hospital and did not return to the outside world for nearly a month, leaving with a diagnosis that split my life in two. In looking back, I see how much has shifted. Energy and motivation, once abundant, have become scarce, especially in recent months. As my body weakens, it grows harder to maintain optimism, momentum, or the desire to pursue the grander ambitions I once clung to.

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And yet, this past year held so much beauty. Madrid to ring in 2025. Charleston on a girls’ trip. Pittsburgh for a magazine release. St. Pete on a spontaneous sisters’ weekend. North Conway for yet another girls’ getaway. And New York City around Christmastime on one of the most dreamy nights of my life. None of these trips were officially on my bucket list; most unfolded naturally as the year progressed. I could never have predicted them a year earlier—neither the destinations nor the people beside me. Meanwhile, several things that were on my list, like a sisters’ trip to Hawaii and attending a sarcoma advocacy weekend in Washington, DC, never came to fruition, interrupted by physical and mental health barriers that arrived without warning. 

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If my first year after diagnosis was marked by relentless determination and near-constant motion, my second has been defined by extremes: profound highs and equally deep lows. This year has taught me that my bucket list can no longer be as audacious as it once was. It must ebb and flow alongside my ever-changing body and mind.

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Rather than viewing my bucket list as a measure of my energy or motivation, I have begun to rethink what I want from the time I have left, allowing these desires to guide me instead. I hold them like matches—small, deliberate sparks meant to keep the fire alive on the hardest days. I have learned, or perhaps relearned, that despite being an adrenaline junkie and lifelong travel enthusiast, my “before-I-kick-the-bucket” list is not meant to be elaborate or expansive. It is meant to be simple, serene, and rooted in love and community.

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I still dream of travel. But when I plan too far ahead, the joy thins. I want distance from hospitals, from this bedroom of mine, from this body that feels borrowed. But more than an escape, I want normal days stitched with meaning, routines that ground me, and moments of connection.

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After two years of trying to transform my original, modest bucket list into something bolder and more impressive, I keep circling back to the same mundane desires: shared meals with good friends, slow mornings with coffee and tea, lying in a bikini at Second Beach, letting the New England summer wash over me while it lasts.

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When my friend first suggested a bucket list—albeit the traditional kind—it felt less like planning for an ending and more like insisting on a middle. While the realist in me insists I am closer to the end than the beginning, I find myself wanting to carve out a middle anyway. My optimism prefers to believe I am closer to the beginning of the end than the end of the end. To keep myself from spiraling into catastrophe, I lean on action. By acting meaningfully each day, even when it’s difficult, I remind myself (and others) that I am still alive and that I still have shit to do on this planet before I’m shipped off to another.

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I often talk through this subject with my hospital social worker because writing about action is easier than taking it. A massive list of grand ambitions once crushed me. I froze beneath it. Now, I am slowly learning that purpose doesn’t come from conquering everything at once. It comes from dismantling the mountain, from planning day-by-day, and trusting that this is enough.

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Break the day into morning, afternoon, and evening, and decide not only what you will do, but where, when, and how you will do it. Start small, and push yourself to act even when you don’t feel like it. Ninety-nine percent of the time, we feel better after doing something than we do after doing nothing at all.

By focusing on simple actions within a single day, we become more intentional with our time. We begin to notice what once brought us joy, what matters most, and which parts of our lives, such as relationships and self-care, may have quietly fallen away.

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As I map out the next few days, I catch myself grinning as I write: spend at least thirty minutes writing each day, work on my website, read an untouched novel from my bookshelf, recite poetry, call loved ones, hike with Valentina (my puppy). With each small intention, I loosen my grip on perfection and let go of the pressure to choose the “right” activities. Instead, I hold onto how these moments guide me back to my essence, to what makes me me.

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Stagnation pulls us away from ourselves, widening the space between body and soul until it fills with fear and regret. Consistent action, on the other hand, brings us home, gently closing the distance that idleness creates.

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I pick up a pen and quietly dare myself to write over what cancer tries to claim. I construct my lists and my efforts to find fountains of daily purpose not as concessions to what I might lose, but as a quiet insistence on what is still mine. Cancer has taken many things from me—a sense of certainty, dreams of a career and family, my physical strength—but it has not taken away my ability to choose meaning. Even on the hardest days, I can still decide how I show up to the life in front of me. I do not insist that this is easy; rather, I insist that this decision is still mine to make.

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There is no triumph in this ending, no clean victory—just persistence. Just an inner resolve to keep participating in my own life despite uncertainty and fear. I make lists not as bargains with time, but as proof that I still get to decide how my days unfold. Each word, each plan, and each intention—no matter how small—is an act of authorship, a reminder to myself and to others that my agency remains ironclad, even when my body feels weak.

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My “bucket list” is no longer about what I must do before I die. It is about what I choose to do each day that I am alive. It is neither a countdown nor a challenge, but a living document that changes as my body does and as my capacities and priorities shift. What I once called a bucket list has become a way of checking in, not checking off—an ongoing conversation with my joy and sense of purpose.

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There is nothing extraordinary about the way I spend my days now, and that is precisely the point. Life, I am learning, does not need to be grandiose to be meaningful. Sometimes, meaning is rooted in staying even when the body and mind are tired. Cancer may revise my body, but it does not get the final edits on my days. So, I keep writing, I keep evolving and, in doing so, I stay.

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My list remains unfinished, and so do I. I do not know what the rest of this list will look like, or how much time I will have to write it. There are blank spaces I have not yet filled, days I cannot plan, and outcomes I cannot predict. For now, I am learning to live inside that openness. The body may reach an end, but the self does not stop becoming.