Does your parent have a bucket list?
Prioritizing connection is not a mistake.
In 2020, my friend Katie Baxter lost her mom, Patti, to skin cancer. The two of them were best friends, and their favorite thing to do together was travel.
“When I was 13, we took a one-month, cross-country train trip, stopping all over the U.S.,” Katie told me. “We did it again the next summer, this time stopping in new places. We'd been all over the Caribbean and Europe together. Every single one of these trips was filled with memories of us laughing until we cried.”
When they found out Patti had skin cancer, they went hard on their mother-daughter trips, exploring Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Scotland.
Katie came home to Florida from Georgia for Thanksgiving in 2019. Her mom and stepfather barely let her sit down after her long drive before telling her the news she’d been dreading since the initial diagnosis: the cancer, leptomeningeal metastases, had spread to her spinal fluid.
“She told me that they told her anywhere from six weeks to six months, which I later found out was a lie. Six weeks was the end number. That was it. And she said six weeks to six months. So, to me, I’m thinking we have until May. I have until May for this time with my mother. Not thinking I had until January.”
With this news, they decided to make one last trip together.
They flew to Australia.
“She decided on Australia since it was warm and I had not been,” Katie said. “She wanted me to see everything she had seen when she was last there—learning from the Aboriginal people, diving the Great Barrier Reef and [taking] a helicopter tour over it, food tours, etc. She booked everything first class all the way (she said they couldn't come for her credit card debt if she was dead and if she miraculously survived she'd be happy to pay it back).”
The memories from that trip weren’t what Katie or her mom expected, as they cut their trip short when Patti’s condition grew clearly worse. Less than a week later, Katie’s mom died.
Now, Katie connects with her memories of her mom by continuing to travel with her husband Bill. “One of her bucket list items was the Scottish Tattoo in Edinburgh. While we did Scotland in 2019 (our final mother-daughter trip), we were not there during the Tattoo, so it's on my list now, in her honor. Thankfully, Bill loves to travel just as much as I do, and we are planning a trip to Scotland in 2026. He lost his dad the same year. We both realize anything could happen to anyone at any moment. We live by the idea of ‘take the trip, you'll never regret it.’”
Do you have a bucket list? Each year, do you sit down, Gretchen Rubin style, and write out what you want to accomplish before the next year starts? Does your parent have a bucket list?
The term is kind of gross and morbid, (don’t think too hard about it, I’m telling you), but the concept is ubiquitous in popular culture, and it’s worth thinking about as your parent grows older.
One of the things on my own bucket list is to visit Hawaii. Living in Florida, the trip to Hawaii seems impossibly long and the politics of traveling fraught (Climate change! Exploitation! Housing crisis!), but there’s something about losing your parents that makes you ravenous for any morsel of connection. My parents met in Hawaii when my mom was 26 and my dad was 37. My mom was on vacation with her friends, and my dad had traveled to Hawaii with his grandfather, checking off an item on his own bucket list.
He proposed to my mom after knowing her for just three days. She laughed at him and resisted saying yes for two more years.
I wish I could ask where exactly they met. What island were they on, even. What hotel they stayed in. Instead, I settle for having “Travel to Hawaii” on my bucket list.
As he grew older, I wish I had prioritized helping my dad have bigger experiences. I made the mistake of planning only for problems, not for connection. And to be honest, sometimes that’s how it is. It’s hard just making sure your parent is getting to their appointments, taking their medications, not eating ranch dressing that expired in 2022. But I wish I had been able to give him a chance to do more once-in-a-lifetime things.
You still have time to ask the questions about what your parents want to do in their remaining years. What’s on their bucket list? What can you help with? What’s something you would like to do together?
It might feel like traveling is out of the question given your parent’s health status, but if a once-in-a-lifetime vacation is on your parent’s bucket list, consider talking to their doctor to see what might make it feasible. If they don’t use one regularly, could they use a wheelchair for a trip? And if traveling really is not possible, perhaps you can explore from home—watch movies about the place, cook food from there, or get your parent a gift themed around the destination.
My dad never visited Washington, D.C. and, as a history buff and a “West Wing” obsessive, he would have loved it. When my husband and I were there recently, we stopped at the World War II Memorial and drove rented scooters past the FDR and MLK monuments. At every stop, grief washed over us. “Your dad would have loved to see this,” Ivan kept saying.
Maybe your parent’s bucket list doesn’t just have travel goals on it. Maybe it has things they wanted to experience or achieve. “Play soccer with my grandchildren,” or “Learn how to paint with watercolors.” Asking your parent about their bucket list might help build the connection between you, which can help with every other caregiving task on your to-do list. Routine hygiene tasks, driving to appointments, talking about end-of-life wishes—it’s all easier if you have a strong relationship.
Maybe you can’t exactly cross off everything on their bucket list, but talking about it might give you ideas for Christmas or birthday gifts, activities to do together, or even things to do after they’re gone to connect with their memory, like Ivan and I making sure to pop by the WWII memorial or Katie and Bill going to Scotland.
It might feel frivolous to take time out to talk to your parent about their bucket list. When you’re busy Googling “assisted living near me” or “signs of dementia,” it might feel silly to start looking up flights to Cancún instead. But connecting with your parent is not a waste of time.
What do you think? Do you have a bucket list? Have you talked with a parent about theirs?