Doing Dad's Bucket List

Laura Carney's father died suddenly, with unfinished business. So she started checking off the items for him.

- Sydney Page

The tattered paper was stashed away in a brown suede pouch, along with her father's driver's license, 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 endeavors, 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.

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.