The Bucket List

Chapter Three

Kat stared at the list, and then back at Leah. "So he'd hidden this?" Kat had known Josh as long as Leah had and she'd never seen, or heard of this list either. "It looks old, it's looking a bit worn out."

"Yeh I know. I don't know how long it's been there. And no wonder he didn't show me it, I mean, go to Amsterdam and 'do' a prostitute, very classy Josh."

They both smirked, slightly disgusted, but slightly amused at the same time. Josh had always been a relatively prim and proper guy. He could enjoy a party, but wanting to visit a lady of the night seemed very out of character for him.

"It's like I didn't really know him," Leah had been thinking about this all night, "we were about to spend the rest of our lives together, we'd been planning the wedding, we have this house, all of these life long commitments and then there's this list. A list of things I never knew he wanted. It makes me sad to think I didn't know him."

Kat could understand her point, but she didn't want Leah's mood dropping after she'd finally managed to get her raising her head above the parapet. "It's not like that. There're things on here that he's ticked off, things he did with you." She scanned the list, "Look, no.4 'Do the Boxing Day Dip', you remember that?"

Leah laughed, yeah she remembered that. It was an event that happened each year in their village. They lived in a small village right on the beach in the north of England, and every Boxing Day morning people would gather on the beach and run into the sea together for 'the dip'. It was crazy, it was dangerous in fact, but people got sponsored and raised money for charity. It brought people together who wouldn't get out at Christmas otherwise, and afterwards everybody went back to the pub for a cup of tea and to talk about their Christmas Day.

They had done it back in 2009, the same year they'd gone to Egypt, and they had both nearly died of hypothermia. She vowed there and then never to do it again, and she never had so far.

"There's so many things on there that we'd never even discussed," Leah took the list off Kat and pointed, "There, no.24, 'meet a real monk'. I mean, a real monk? When had he ever met a fake one?!" They both laughed now, and Leah began to warm to the list.

When she had first found it she felt betrayed whilst she read it, as though Josh had hidden a world from her that he had never allowed her into. As she read further down the list, and looked at the ones he had ticked off however, she felt closer to him, as though she'd been given a dying gift. A gift of sight into the parts of him she hadn't known. It wasn't that he hid it from her; she just hadn't had enough time with him to discover those parts yet. That time had been snatched from them on that tragic night, their lengthy marriage of many years taken from them. Her dreams of children and a little dog running around in the back garden were gone in a flash and she'd felt as though there was a huge gaping hole that could never be filled.

Yet here she sat, holding a list, to most it would have been simply that, a list. A summary of one man's life dreams and a few ticks to show his accomplishments. But to Leah it was something else. To Leah, it was a connection, a strand still attached to Josh. It was a light at the end of her tunnel of grief and darkness, it was a beacon calling out to her. It was hope.

She was going to do it.

"I'm going to do it." She looked at Kat, and saw the confusion on her face. "I'm going to do it." She repeated the words, was she convincing herself or Kat? She wasn't sure.

"What the hell are you on about? Going to do what?" It suddenly dawned on Leah that she'd been sat quiet for a few minutes while she thought about this, Kat was completely oblivious to her thought process. No wonder she was confused.

"I'm going to do the list. I'm going to complete his list." Was she sure? "Everything on there, every one. Minus the ones he's already ticked off of course - I'm not doing the dip again."