Before You Die: LIVE!

Permission Granted!

Foreword by Ellen Cunningham Lambert

What if your lifetime had ended last week and the sands in your hourglass all ran out? Scary thought, I know, but bear with me. What if it had? What if it turned out you didn’t have the all those extra days next days or decades you had been counting on?

What were the things you always wanted to do that you never got around to doing? What places went unseen, what adventures did you miss? Who never knew how much they meant to you?

How many items on your bucket list were left unchecked?

I have had two recent life-reminders that our sands can sift through that hourglass pretty darn fast. The first was an auto accident. One of those, never-saw-it-hit-us events everyone miraculously walked away from. That was the first time it ever occurred to me I might not live forever.

After the wreck, I changed jobs and addresses and stopped talking about Paris and went. I dined on the Eiffel Tower and sailed the Seine and walked the Champs Elysees and came home and swiftly forgot about near misses and second chances.

The life reminder that had the greatest impact, well, had the greatest impact. I was running an ordinary errand to the local drug store. As I was walking up to the familiar store entrance, a distracted young woman in an SUV backed out of her spot and into me. Bystanders said I flew twenty feet.

Lying on the ground with those giant tires fast approaching my head, I remember thinking, Oh, no. Not yet. I haven’t… In ten seconds it’s amazing how many items you can add to your bucket list. That, uh, run-in, literally knocked sense into me and forever changed my life. I now know with absolute certainty that tomorrow is not guaranteed and whatever time I have left will never ever be enough. I moved, again. I changed jobs, again. Now, instead of wishing I could write full-time, I do.

Kahla Kiker has written this book, which reminds me I’ve gotten complacent again. Complacency is a chronic disease we all suffer from and must battle with everything in us. Every single day is a chance to do something you’ve always wanted to do. Every day is your golden opportunity. Kahla brings you these stories to show you don’t have to have a near-death experience to wake you up and shake you up; you hold in your hands all the motivation and inspiration you need to jumpstart your life and your list.

Oh, make no mistake. You have a bucket list. You may never have taken the time to commit yours to writing, but in your heart, in your mind, yes, you definitely have a whole host of things you want to see, do, accomplish, have, hold and be before you die.

See, the question isn’t what’s on your bucket list or how long your list is or even whether you’ve written it down. What really matters is this. What are you going to do about it, and when are you going to start?

You read that correctly. What are YOU going to do about it, and when are YOU going to start?

Forget all the excuses for why you can’t. You may not be able to orchestrate how long you live or how many times you get to circle the sun, but this you can do. You can set your mind to doing the very most important things you want to do before you die, and then you can go about doing them. For as long as you may live, you can live doing all the things you’ve always wanted to do, starting right now.

Whether your bucket list remains a litany of wishful thinking or an action plan for the rest of your life - that’s entirely up to you. But if you need a jumpstart? If you need a reminder that this life you’re leading is your one and only, turn the page.

Everything you have always wanted to accomplish awaits. The clock is ticking. In your hands you hold the ultimate permission slip to go and do and see and be. Permission granted. See to it!

Ellen Cunningham Lambert

Introduction

The alarm went off again, and I couldn’t believe it was time to get up - again. Get up, get the kids up, get everyone ready for work and school, take them to school, go to work, pick up the kids, drive them around to various sporting practices, go home, make supper, get depressed about my growing laundry, get everyone ready for bed, sit at the table and write, and finally get into bed myself. Only to repeat this routine M-F.

I was losing myself. I wasn’t struggling, I wasn’t worried over my family or finances, I had just enough, and I was truly blessed beyond measure. Only I was extremely unhappy. Every time I looked on FB and saw someone at one of my bucket list destinations I cried. Not over jealously or envy, but over my life passing me by when my soul screamed for adventure.

I didn’t have an ‘ah-ha’ moment or get diagnosed with an illness or have someone die when everything changed for me. I simply had another birthday. I knew my unhappiness was because I felt like life was passing me by and I also knew that my fear of the unknown and maybe even my fear of complete happiness were the reasons I was preventing myself from taking that desperate step toward the life I really wanted.

So what did I do? I swallowed my fear and took that blind step anyway. I don’t have a tangible bucket list, because the ever-evolving one in my head lends me the flexibility I need to stay calm through it all. But I pursue one thing at a time, here’s what happened: Las Vegas? Check. Aspen, Colorado? Check. Sea World? Check. Six Flags? Check. Having a son? Check. De-clutter my home? Check. Become a published author? CHECK!

One by one, they add up to a new life and all kinds of satisfaction. And, here’s my point, they add up to a life where I’ve chosen my path, I’ve created memories I cherish, I’m participating in my life, and I’m fulfilled (I’ve turned life into something special and specially for me)…at the same time that I’m walking through the humdrum and all the have to’s that grey out our souls. Can you see that this bucket list approach is something anyone (and by anyone, of course, you know I mean YOU) can do?

Bucket list dreams don’t have to be extremely expensive or completely improbable - they just have to be dreams you fulfill that feed your soul with the energy of life. Big, small, cheap, expensive, free! There is room for all types! Don’t limit yourself and for your life’s sake, (this is important!) never doubt that you deserve all the happiness, life and adventure your soul can stand.

My example is a work in progress and always will be. My bucket list is always changing and growing, and always will be. Is my example perfect? No way. If I waited for perfect, I wouldn’t have started. But it does have the most important ingredient of all. It’s really happening. And it’s right for me. You have dreams, large and small, that are right for you.

This book contains 108 stories of everyday people fulfilling bucket list dreams…

Why not get started on yours?

Stop what you are doing.

Look around you. The only time you have is now.

Write a Best Seller

I grew up with a pencil in my hand, continually scribbling away at one story or another, stories of adventure, of intrigue, stories that churned from my daydreams. My mother, hovering over the stove, would glower at me as I peppered her with the phrase, Just one more sentence! before I scurried to the dinner table, ready to eat. Usually, I had pencil smears on my face, on my hands. These forced my mother into a sort of hysteric, as well. What a mess you’ve turned into, she would say, shaking her ever-so-sensible head wearily.

She didn’t want me to go to college. She’d been a seamstress her whole life, rooted in the belief that hard labor was the manner in which we were all meant to live, to get by. Our Omaha apartment, right off Main Street, was the place we moved to after my daddy died of a heart attack out on the field. Back then, I dove into the stories to escape the sadness of that terrible scenario, watching as the young field boys carried my father’s body in from the soy. Sweat was still pouring down his face, down his arms. Heart attack, my mother said. Third farmer that year. No bucket list for him, just never-ending hard labor.

Times were hard. Between learning to sew, learning to cook, learning the hard labor mechanics I was meant to know, I eternally hovered over my notebook, creating stories and characters, anyone I would long to meet somewhere, in a faraway land. In so many ways back then, I assumed this faraway land was something like college, a place where people came from all over to learn, to read, where people came from all over not to work with their hands, but to work with their minds, with their hearts.

I got the scholarship, of course, because of my father’s untimely death. The town booted me off to university, shaking their fingers at my rag-tag books and grinning at me in a way that made me realize I had never been understood, not a moment in my entire life.

My mother cried as she drove me in the old Ford pickup all the way to State. She told me to major in something sensible, to do something that could support the family. But even as she said the word family, I sensed her hesitation. The only family we had was each other; it was just she and I. We were like islands.

I reached toward her and tucked my head close to hers. I pushed myself out of a daydream and saw my mother’s wrinkles, my mother’s tired eyes. I nodded my head and told her I’d make her proud; I’d make her proud.

The years were a flurry of sparkling conversations, of literature and (just a few) boys. I moved from the dorm to the apartments, only visiting my sad, grey mother during important holidays like the Thanksgiving when we ate pie and drank wine together like two old friends, giggling over a lost afternoon. The Christmas when she’d cried about my father, again, just because he’d missed so much. The irony of all she herself had missed was lost on me at the time.

My mother died before I published my first book, my best seller. She died the spring I was writing it. I remember aching in the chair as I heard the news. The post office worker who had found her—Marty was his name — his voice quivered over the phone, Heart attack. Like your father.

The terror of losing them both rooted me deeper in my dream world. Several months later, several tears later, and the manuscript before me, I flung myself to Denver to meet with a famous publishing agent. He tapped at the manuscript with a long nail and looked at me darkly. We have something here, he murmured.

And then the book was out; it was on shelves. I glided my finger atop the copies’ spines in the fancy Denver bookshop, watching the far off mountains and thinking only of my mother. The book, entitled The Seamstress, held her turmoil, held her everlasting love for me (and mine for her). The New York Times declared the main character, the Seamstress herself, as the portrait of the classic Midwestern woman during times of strife, turning her chin toward the sun and forcing herself forward.

My legacy was this: millions of people allowing my story to dip into their hearts, to resonate with them. In many ways, now, I was so much like that Midwestern woman, my mother. Her hopes were for my future, not her own. My future success was her only bucket list, and, although she wasn’t here to see it, she achieved it. My job from now on was to continue with her bucket list and to live my life so that not only her dreams but my current and future dreams were fulfilled. I turned my chin toward the future, knowing I had created something truly good, truly of the Earth; something that truly belonged to the people. I turned myself to the future, and I forced myself beyond the present, beyond my parents—but not without them. I was rooted in love and good wishes for my life. I had my words, and I had my soil. The rest, I could create.

New Zealand

His name had been Roderick the great grandfather I had never met who came to the United States from New Zealand, all those years ago. His portrait showed a ruddy complexion, trusting eyes. The photograph hung above my grandfather’s fireplace until the day he died, when I took it for my run-down Brooklyn apartment to hang above my bed—a portrait of my past, a portrait of the possibility of becoming.

I tried to remember what Roderick thought of America when he arrived—how it had all looked to him. Naturally, he had flocked to New York City for its vibrancy, for its opportunity. And yet, as I walked down many of the New York streets in those days after my grandfather’s funeral, I couldn’t quite see what he had seen in the place. I watched a couple scream at each other in the street; I watched a man sweep at his stoop in the dismal July heat, wiping his brow every few minutes, as if on repeat. Everything seemed to be falling apart; everything seemed manic. I crawled back up to my apartment each day after my all-too-tight job at the paper, feeling like the world was gnawing at me. I had to do something differently; I had to make a choice. Just like Roderick had.

The day I quit my job and bought the plane ticket back, I felt the waves of encouragement, of hope I was sure Roderick had felt during those initial days. I’m going to America, I was sure he had spoken over and over, in a hushed whisper—his eyes to the horizon, much like my own. I’m running away. I’m going back. Roderick. Roderick. My heart is not in this place anymore. I talked to his photograph, touching at the delicate, nearly-ancient frame. Let’s go back.

In those days, I had nothing, no friends, and no partner. I had my parents, but they had swept off to Chicago, to the wind, to the cheery Midwesterners, and left my grandfather and me in New York City—in the dismal, shaded streets. I called them before I left, and they laughed at me in the sure manner of parents. Okay. Call us when you need money to get back.

I had no going away party; I didn’t have anyone to party with. I didn’t have anyone to kiss goodbye. My boyfriend of four years had cheated on me the previous summer, and I had lived a solid twelve months with the knowledge gnawing at me—through Halloween, through Thanksgiving, through Christmas, through bleak January. I had lived with the knowledge that I wasn’t good enough for this land, for this place that had been chosen for me, all those years ago, by the ruddy-cheeked man on the mantel.

The land, I had been told, would be green. The people, wide-eyed and looking ever for wonder. (So much like Roderick, but without the certainty to put their feet on the boat.) I packed only a single suitcase, and I bounded onto the plane, eyeing everyone I saw on the path. I was never sure, during the flight to New Zealand, if this was the end or if this was the beginning.

When I landed in New Zealand, I found my way to the bus station. I pulled out a few measly NZ dollars knowing how much trouble Roderick must have had as he stood at Ellis Island, carrying only his face and his name. I had so much more because of him, I knew. I had so much more.

The bus out to the tiny town, two hours from Auckland, led me beyond mountains, beyond illustrious lakes, rivers. I felt like I was finally in a sort of fantasy land—one that was so starkly different, so starkly daydream-like in its juxtaposition with Brooklyn, with screaming, with the sweeping man on the stoop who hadn’t had a daydream in his life.

At the pub that evening, I sat at the window, wrapping myself in all of my clothes. There, on the other side of the world, it was a different kind of June, a winter June. I couldn’t have known when Roderick had come if he had planned for the polar opposition. I couldn’t have known if he suffered in the heat, the stifling nature of haughty New York City, or if he stumbled through the gut-wrenching cold the city pushed into you, as if forcing you out.

The man at the bar handed me a beer—a local brew, he said. I nodded at him, noting that his cheeks were ruddy from the cold. Say. You know a Roderick Gimley from around here? I asked him. I knew he wouldn’t know him; I knew Roderick had left a century ago and his name had filtered off into the mountains.

Roderick! Why, Roderick’s my good mate! the man nodded at me before turning back around.

I smiled, feeling his good-natured lie coursing through my veins. There, in New Zealand, you could believe anything you wanted. You could believe in a magical land called New York City—you could believe in it so much, you could change the course of both your life and your descendants. I understood the magic of having a dream and following that dream.

There, in the center of the mountains, of the glowing lakes away from Auckland’s city lights, I was able—for nearly the first time—to fall into a sort of daydream, a center of natural uncertainness, of happiness. There, fulfilling my bucket list, I felt a new kind of courage, and I believed anything was possible.

Holland Windmill House

I saw the windmill house in one of my picture books as a little girl. The cartoon portrayed a small cottage home with its great, winding arms swirling slowly, like a metronome, through the air. I asked my mother as we sat together by the fire, What is this place?

And she answered quickly—because she was a businesswoman and she had places to go, people to see, and children to put to bed—That’s Holland, of course.

Holland became my consistent muse, the place I went in my mind whenever I was lonely, whenever I was scared. I thought of the adorable Dutch shoes, of the tidy Dutch cottage home that felt so much more like home than my very cold, very fine-tuned Boston apartment. I remember delivering the valedictorian address at my high school, looking out over a sea of five hundred, six hundred people, all of them pointing their sad, grey eyes directly toward me. I remember, then in that terror of anxiety, I thought only of that cottage home with its windmills wrapping round and round. There was such a sense of assurance, there in that house. As I closed the speech, saying my last stoic but confident words, I imagined the wind on my face. I imagined putting trust in something so majestic, so foreign. Something so completely different from what had come before me in my world of 1 + 1 = college, job, family, death.

I went to Holland for the first time after college. The girls and I—because this is the term so often utilized by women who gab alongside other women—decided to take a trek through Europe. All of us liberal arts graduates, we didn’t have jobs lined up—not like my businesswoman mother had all those years ago. And certainly not like our friends who had looked at school sensibly, rather than adventurously.

We flew to Paris first and feasted on cheese, bread, wine — whatever we could get our hands on. We strapped huge backpacks to our backs and we train hopped through the city, gazing at the wonder of a thousand-year-old history. There was a pulse to the culture, something so stoic about it.

But still, it seemed elevated, out of reach. As I think about Paris, about Rome, about Athens now, I can’t really grasp the FEEL of the cities. They didn’t feel like home, to me. Not places I could go in my head when I felt afraid. Not places that would wrap me up in their warmth as the huge wings wound round and round the house, as if they were on defense, keeping us safe. Suddenly, I knew what would make this trip come alive for me. It was the one thing I always wanted to experience, the most important thing on my bucket list, even before I knew I had one.

I convinced the girls to go to Holland, although one of them was very homesick and the other was running out of money. We pooled our Euros and we hopped on a rag-tag bus that lurched through the mountains toward Amsterdam. When we arrived, we hopped off the bus into darkness, already feeling deep pain that spread through our tired backs. (Our backpacks had become permanent affectations on our bodies.)

With barely a few pieces of bread to put together, we found a toppling-over cottage on the hill outside of the city. The sign out front swung back and forth with the wind from the windmill arms as they swept round and round. The sign read, Bed and Breakfast in English.

We collapsed at the door front and rang the bell many times. It was nearly eleven in the evening, but it felt like the end of the world. Finally, an old, crooked woman cracked the door open.

Hallo, she spoke in a Dutch accent.

I listened to the space between her words and mine as the windmill wings swept round and round. It felt safe, there. It felt like nothing else in the world had ever happened or would ever happen. It felt like the windmill cottage was safe from the sheer passing of time. And we—college graduates eager to escape our future—needed this solace.

We told her we needed a room. We needed pillows. We needed comfort. She led us to the upstairs bedroom, at the helm of the windmill. I looked outside the window and saw the great arms whipping by. Between each swipe, I could see Amsterdam below. The lights from the ancient buildings glowed in the many intersecting canals.

Nothing was certain, I thought then, as a contrary rush of assurance swept over me. My mind felt at ease; my muscles relaxed. I had realized my dream, and what I had dreamed about all my life did not disappoint me. I had found this beautiful solitude, this sense of solace here in this Holland town. As I watched the moon rise over the top of us, as the windmill continued its slow and steady trek at the helm of the cottage, I embraced the difference between my life and so many others. There was no path; there was no future; there was no past. There, in that cottage home, I was simply a person without time. And that, beyond anything else, made me free, made me feel centered, and gave me strength.

French Canadian Culture

Traveling was always on my bucket list, of course. But the minute Mandy, my now-wife, got pregnant during those months after high school, I understood that my life—my bucket list—was no longer my own. (How I could remember the night we’d conceived—just a week after graduation and our whole lives ahead of us! We’d been the first of our families to graduate, and that, we thought, made us impervious to danger.)

And so, the marriage happened. I drank Bud with my older brothers as my wife donned an off-white wedding dress. (Nothing really white was meant for her, her mother explained. She was already pregnant.) The Bud kept flowing through the night. Every time I looked at my wife, at her dark, muffled eyes, I sensed her inherent disappointment. I wondered if that disappointment was directed at herself or at me.

Our daughter was born when I was only nineteen years old, seven months after the ceremony. I worked tirelessly at the Rocky Mount, West Virginia factory in those days, where my father and his father had worked, as well. Their pictures lined the walls, greasy from the rough texture of the factory environment. They were dead now. Both of them had been smokers—gasping till the day they died. Neither of them had ever been north of the Mason-Dixon line. No bucket list for them. We were southerners, they always told me. Nothing else was essential. The factory squelched the travel ideas from my brain then. I knew only to target my eyes forward, toward pension, toward retirement. Toward, perhaps, the day I finally picked up smoking like my friends, my co-workers. All of us resigned to our fate.

Our son was born when I was twenty-one. By that time, I felt like I was eighty years old. I felt assured I would die, just like my father had, when I was fifty. I already felt like my life was near-over. Clutching at my chest every day as I entered the factory, I thought I could feel my heart beating faster and faster, as if it were looking for a way to scamper out of my chest and out onto the floor. I imagined it slip-sliding away in the grease and the grime as my knees splattered to the concrete.

The kids grew older without much notice. They grew interested in things, just like I knew I had been, as well. The fish, the lizards, the outdoor exploration — their eyes were wide, and their hearts were open—even as I felt mine begin to close. It was only when one of them brought a school report home—a report about French Canada—that I remembered there was another world out there. I felt the itch in the back of my mind the possibility.

The girl, Marcia, had done the report. Fifteen years old, named after my wife’s aunt, dead at sixteen. The teen-aged girl, my daughter, pointed to the pictures of the beautiful buildings and explained to me that Canada was like a mixed bag. There are the French and the Canadians, she said. The French live in Quebec, generally. They live sort of like the French do, but with a North American flair. I watched her lips as she said it. Her teeth were so white; they hadn’t seen nicotine a day in their lives.

We should go, I said then. I pointed at it on the map, up there above the Northern states. We can drive there. Take a few days, but we can go. My daughter, understanding the depth of this statement, raised only one eyebrow—as if to say, prove it.

I hadn’t ever asked for a day off in my life from the factory. Not when Marcia had the flu. Not when Johnny broke his leg and needed to have surgery at the tidy age of eight. But I walked into the office with a vision in my head of what my life should have been. How far I had fallen! I asked the boss for two weeks, two solid weeks. And, with assertive laughter in his voice, my boss granted it.

Marcia, Johnny, Mandy, and I bounced into the car on that June day. We packaged everything together and prepared ourselves. I felt, in