During our last month at Hebrew University, when I was 20 and my husband 19, we took a long, sweaty bus ride down to Egypt, where we stayed in cheap pensions, eating street food (that didn’t go well), and visiting the Valley of the Kings, Abu Simbel, Karnak, the Ben Ezra Synagogue, and my dad’s first home in the once rather Jewish neighbourhood of Sakakini. And, of course, we went to Giza to ride horses around the Pyramids and the Sphinx. While there, we took what turned out to be the first in a series of pictures in front of “bucket list” landmarks.
By the time we were three kids into our marriage, we had a tall wooden picture frame hanging on our wall. The frame had room for many photographs and held a growing collection of vertical 4x6s, each printed in sepia. In one, we were kissing at the Egyptian pyramids. In another, I leaned, pregnant, to kiss my husband as though in the last scene of a romantic film, with the Hollywood sign at our backs. Over the years, we’ve handed over cameras – later phones – to strangers and joined lips before Times Square and the Sydney Opera House and the leaning tower of Pisa. We smooched in front of Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower and the Colosseum. We snogged at St Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow, with its cluster of colourful onion domes. We displayed public affection beside the Hagia Sofia.
Still, time was always short, money was always short, and empty spaces lingered. One day, hating the way the last three blank windows stared blindly at me, I scribbled the names of aspirational locales on paper and tucked them inside the remaining slots. “The Great Wall of China,” I wrote, and “Machu Picchu” and “Taj Mahal”.
Then, a lucky break. I was invited to teach a course in China. Off we went, dragging kids into the million-degree heat and 1000 per cent humidity. One of the three windows was filled. A few summers later, in 2019, all the stars aligned to allow us to send the kids to camp. We bought hiking boots and altitude tablets and set off for the Inca Trail.
One aspirational window remained.
Covid, of course, stopped travel and camp and everything else completely for a while. But funnily enough, I was asked to go to India for work not long after things picked up again. I was thrilled. I could visit the last place on my bucket list! The only problem was that the trip was scheduled for January 2023. One kid was revising for his A-levels. One was revising for his GCSEs. One was still little. They all needed to be in school, and they couldn’t be left alone. In other words, even though he was on study leave, my husband absolutely could not join me. So, alone, I went to Delhi, and I went to Mumbai, but not Agra.
Two months later I found a lump on my breast. I suspect it’s common to start a bucket list upon receiving a cancer diagnosis. It makes sense. You become hyper-aware that your time left on this earth is limited. I’m not sure, however, that it’s a great idea.
A bucket list is, by its very nature, fatalistic. It’s a countdown to death. Check off these 20 things, and you can die! Or in my case, since my list was not new but longstanding, check off this one?
There is another issue with it. Why should I be beholden to a plan inadvertently formed when I was 20? I didn’t call my children Anastasia Monique Chantal, Charity Elisant, or Chiara Nediva, the three names I wrote down on a piece of paper in my youth and sealed in an envelope to be opened upon their births, did I? (I suspect my three sons are grateful I ignored my own instructions).
No, I decided. There would be no bucket list.
So, when we had to make our way from England to Australia this summer and found that the best way to break up the flights was to stop in India for a few days, we did go to Agra, and we did take a kissing picture in front of the Taj Mahal.
But trust me, that had nothing to do with a bucket list. Mere coincidence.
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