Will completing my dad's bucket list help the healing process?
It's Grief Awareness Week, and more than a year and a half since Ella Wilcox's dad passed away. But by working through the list of lifetime goals they drew up together, she's discovered grieving is an ongoing - and ever-changing - process.
By Ella Wilcox
It’s rush hour at Manchester Piccadilly Station and everyone is on the move.
Everyone but me.
I’m stood perfectly still, my eyes fixed on the platform gates, waiting for a train to pull in. I'm thinking about what I’m about to do and I’m thinking about my dad.
Or, more specifically, I’m thinking about what I’m about to do for my dad.
In March 2022, I was a normal university student finishing my dissertation and looking forward to the future - when one morning a knock on the door changed my life forever.
My dad, Napoleon, was on his first day back at work after having Covid-19 when he suffered a sudden heart attack. He died before he could be taken to hospital.
Losing my dad at only 21 threw my whole future into question. I lost sight of what my life could be like and began to stagnate. After I graduated, my friends moved on, starting new jobs in new cities. But I had no sense of closure, and couldn’t - or wouldn’t - let myself move on.
That was until I found our bucket list.
It was an indistinct piece of white paper, folded and kept in the top draw of his desk and hadn’t been touched for three years.
My dad always talked about the things he would want to do and the places he would want to go to - but he was a workaholic and never found the time. So, at 14, I told him that enough was enough, that he should make his dreams a reality, and we wrote them down. All 20 of them.
Finding the list in his office desk drawer, days after he died, reminded me of all the things we had planned to do together, and the memories he would now miss out on. Memories like going to Japan to see the cherry blossom, or flying through the air at the Bristol Balloon Fiesta.
Or being greeted by a loved one at an airport arrivals gate, like at the end of Love Actually, my dad’s favourite Christmas film and, possibly, the quirkiest entry on the bucket list.
But when your person can no longer make the memories they were supposed to - why not do it for them?
So that’s what I did.
Which is why I’m stood by the departures board at Manchester Piccadilly, waiting for my partner’s train to pull up to the platform. When he arrives, I’m going to fling myself into his arms like Martine McCutcheon's character does to Hugh Grant's Prime Minister at the end of my dad's favourite Christmas movie.
Am I crazy for doing this?
“There's no right or wrong way to grieve," said grief specialist Jo Goodwin-Worton. "That's the most important thing to recognise. Whatever method you come up with is right for you."
Jo lost her husband to stage four gastro-oesophageal cancer in 2018. She used her grief to take a leap of faith and change career. After going back to university to retrain, Jo qualified as a grief specialist.
“I love what I do because I just feel it’s such a privilege to be able to use my experience to help others,” she said.
But even grief specialists don’t have the answer on how to approach your grief - each person will have a different journey with bereavement.
“It’s not about what you do, it’s about keeping those memories alive,” she said.
So that’s what I’ve decided to do: to live the life he should have been able to live and hopefully help with the healing process too.
“When a person dies we lose the physical person, but we don’t actually lose them - they don’t die in us, they carry on forever,” said Jo.
“What’s really important is how we choose ourselves to make those new memories and to keep the memories we had before they passed away, alive - and that is possible to do.”
Holding on to memories I've made with my dad is certainly easy to do. Some of my happiest memories are with him - including when we ticked off two items on our bucket list together.
We managed to go to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and to New York at Christmas to see the Rockefeller tree - something I had always dreamed of doing. We went in time for my 18th birthday and squeezed in as much as we could on our short trip.
Exploring part of the world with him gave me memories that will last a lifetime - memories that mean so much more to me now that he is no longer here.
Susan Roughton shares that feeling too. Her daughter Lyndsey was diagnosed with a brain tumour, and before she died they tried to spend the time she had left making happy memories.
“We decided that every day we were going to fill it with something new and make her smile every day,” Susan said.
“Her biggest wish was to go to Thailand, but the consultants told us that if she went, she won’t come back.”
But Lyndsey went anyway - and came back. And then lived for another 18 months.
“It was like the power of doing something that she really wanted to do gave her something to live for,” Susan said.
“From that point on we just carried on what we were doing and made every day special and made her laugh every day and the power of positivity came through in that.”
After Lyndsey passed away, Susan went on to found Purple Heart Wishes, a charity which grants wishes to adults aged 18-35 that have been diagnosed with a terminal illness.
“The biggest thing that’s helped me with Lyndsey’s death is the charity. I get to talk about her every day and one way or another everything we do is for her legacy,” she said.
“When families go on these wishes, they say something like, ‘it’s made me realise that I want to live and that I’ve got to do this for my family’. Even though it may be short-lived it makes them feel like there’s something to live for.”
Purple Heart Wishes grants more than 75 wishes a year and is continuing to help more and more families. To help fundraise they ask people to volunteer at kiosks in stadiums in Manchester, and take a percentage of the profits at the end of the day to help fund future wishes.
Since my dad passed away, I’ve been lucky enough to tick two things off our bucket list. But both experiences brought up a strange mix of emotions.
The first thing I did was go to the Eurovision Song Contest in Liverpool. My dad and I vowed to go if the UK ever hosted - an improbable dream that came true after the war in Ukraine meant that the runner-up would host.
Getting to finally live my dream was everything I could have dreamt and more - except the fact that my best friend in the whole world was not there to experience it with me.
Then, less than a month later, I was able to see Coldplay on their Music of the Spheres tour at Etihad Stadium in Manchester.
Coldplay had been one of my dad’s favourite bands for as long as I can remember. Their music played on almost every car journey we went on and we often talked about wanting to see them live.
Being in a stadium with more than 50,000 people should have a feeling of euphoric togetherness - bringing strangers together with one common interest.
But I have never felt more alone than the moment I watched them perform Viva La Vida, the song that played as my dad’s coffin was carried out of the church at his funeral.
“The nature of grief is that it makes you feel alone, separated from somebody, even if you have someone to talk to,” said Karey Lucas-Hughes, who lost her mum, Sheila, while pregnant with her first child.
She revealed how, even after two decades, she still struggles with her loss at times - most recently, in the Covid-19 enforced lockdowns.
“Without normal life, all that grief I don’t think I’d really dealt with came up to the surface,” she said.
“I felt like she died two weeks ago. It was a massive trigger for me.”
Moving forward, it seems, isn’t as easy as it sounds. I was told early on that grief would sneak up on me in even the happiest of moments, which I learnt the hard way while stood in the Etihad Stadium.
Even though completing something on the list wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be, and it brought up lots of emotions, I could not be happier that I did it. It’s made me to want to do more.
So here I am, stood waiting in Manchester Piccadilly Station waiting for my partner to arrive so I can jump into his arms and tick another thing off the list.
It might not be exactly what my dad had envisioned and I am certainly not close to completing it, but slowly but surely I am ticking things off.
In truth, I don’t want to complete the list.
The list ending might feel as if my dad’s chapter is finishing, or like I have to let him go. So, every day I think of new things that he would have wanted to do and put it on the list - this way, it’ll never end.
People may think that being able to do the bucket list means I have moved on, but that could not be further from the truth.
Jo Goodwin-Worton told me: “It’s not about moving on - it’s about moving forward.”
And the girl stood by the departures board at Piccadilly Station is trying.
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