Doing Dad's Bucket List

The tattered paper was stashed away in a brown suede pouch, along with her father’s driver’s licence, a ring and various trinkets. It was her late father’s bucket list, scribbled on three pages torn from a spiral notebook. Laura Carney looked down at it, then she glanced up at her husband. Without a word spoken, they both knew: “I needed to finish it,” says Carney, 46.

“She had been wanting to find a way to understand her dad a little better,” says Carney’s husband, Steven Seighman. “As soon as we saw the list, it was immediately like, This is it.” Her brother, David, was the first to spot it. He uncovered the treasure in 2016—13 years after their father, Michael ‘Mick’ Carney, was tragically killed when he was 54 by a distracted driver.

The list, Carney says, was written in 1978, the year she was born. It had 60 tasks, five of which had already been checked off, including ‘do a comedy monologue in a nightclub’ and ‘see a World Series game live’. One was marked ‘failed’—’pay back my dad $1,000 plus interest’. That left 54 items for Carney to complete. The tasks ranged from relatively simple undertakings, like ‘swim the width of a river’ and ‘grow a watermelon’, to more complicated endeavours, like ‘correspond with the Pope’ and ‘be invited to a political convention’. Several tasks were seemingly impossible (mainly, ‘talk with the President’). Still, Carney was undeterred.

All photographs Courtesy of Laura Carney via The Washington Post

She was 25, an aspiring writer living in New York City, when her father was hit by a driver who ran a red light while chatting on a cellphone in Limerick, Pennsylvania. In the immediate aftermath of her father’s death, “I didn’t talk about it,” says Carney, who is now based in Montclair, New Jersey. “I really had some shame about it, because it felt like such an undignified way to die.” A few years later, though, she became an activist for safe driving, writing articles about the subject, fund-raising and giving talks and interviews. She met a group of people “who were trying to do something to solve what had become a much more common way to die,” Carney says.

But the trauma of her father’s death lingered. For Carney, the bucket list was an unexpected opportunity to work through her pain and reconnect with her dad. “I found a way to keep his spirit alive in my life,” she says. “It was a thing I needed to do so I could get back in touch with my real self.”

When she first got the list, she crafted a tentative timeline. She put off pricier items—including going to the Super Bowl and visiting Europe—and the item that scared her most: ‘Drive a Corvette’.

“The first couple ones that I did happened organically,” Carney says. She had already signed up for a marathon, which allowed her to check ‘run 15 kilometers straight’ off the list.

Another item she completed early on was ‘talk with the President’. She learnt that former President Jimmy Carter—who would have been president when Carney’s father wrote the list—taught Sunday school in Georgia. She and her husband flew there to meet him.

For some items, Carney used poetic licence, she says. For instance, one task was ‘sing at my daughter’s wedding’. “The way we honoured him at my wedding was we drank a cabernet that he had purchased in 1978,” says Carney, adding that he had left a note on the bottle, which said ‘open on Laura’s wedding day’. “It had been sitting there, waiting,” Carney says. “I was thinking, Well, our bellies were singing.”

While Carney completed many of the bucket list tasks on her own—including a two-week trip to Europe—“it didn’t really feel like I was doing things alone, because I knew my dad was with me,” she says. “I feel like my relationship with him is very present.” Carney’s brother and mother accompanied her for some activities, and her husband joined her for others.

“After about the first year or two of doing this project, he would say to me that the person he had always seen in me was coming out,” Carney says. “I had all these layers of grief and trauma and fear that I was leaving behind.” On 27 December 2022, Carney checked off the last task on her dad’s list: ‘Have five songs recorded’. She picked a few of her father’s favourites, including ‘The Rainbow Connection’ from The Muppet Movie and the Beatles’ ‘Good Night’. She recorded them in a studio and did the final touches at home.

“My fondest memories of him are him singing to us before we went to bed at night,” Carney says. “It felt like I was singing with him again.” Completing the bucket list enabled Carney to get to know her dad in a way she hadn’t had the chance to—and never thought she would.

“These were his goals and his dreams,” she says. “It helped me understand him better, to see him as a full human being instead of just my embarrassing dad. And doing that helped me to understand myself.” Like his daughter, Mick Carney was a writer. He spent his days working as a salesman and his spare time singing, writing and performing. “My dad was such a dreamer,” Carney says. “He knew what it meant to be alive; he knew how to have fun.” Finishing her father’s bucket list was the most fulfilling experience of her life, she says. So she decided to write her own bucket list.

“I really encourage everybody to write down what they want to do,” she says. “It helps you start living more intentionally. And when you’re living intentionally, you feel more of a sense of purpose in your life.” Carney says she isn’t afraid of leaving some of the items on her own list unchecked. “Even if this doesn’t happen in my lifetime,” she says, “maybe somebody will do it for me. I like that idea.”