The Man Who Plagiarized His Epitaph. And Other Poems. My friend would have loved it.

Bucket list comes from kick the bucket, of course. But where kick the bucket comes from no one seems to know.

What does a bucket have to do with anything? And why kick it? And is there supposed to be something in the bucket? (My friend.)

I always thought it was about a dying horse. It kicked its bucket when it collapsed. But I can find no source for this.

Any connection to the Russian superstition that seeing someone carrying an empty bucket is a bad omen?

Except for my friend and one other woman, who says simply that she doesn’t know, everyone says they believe they will see their loved ones again. Not for the first time, I note that no one ever seems to be afraid of going to Hell. Hell is other people, if you agree with Sartre. Evidently, to most, it’s for other people, never for yourself. And never for the ones you’re looking forward to seeing again. Like the extinction of life on earth as a result of nuclear war or climate change, an afterlife that includes the possibility of never-ending fear and pain appears to be a horror too vast to be assimilable.

Paradise, California, lost. After the Camp Fire had laid waste to the town, one editorialist wrote, “That human imagination envisaged the place of eternal damnation as an inferno and that human folly has created a future of ever-worsening heat waves and wildfires might strike at least some as two hells of a coincidence.”

I catch myself wishing—not without guilt—that the podcast was more interesting. Bored by the way they talk about themselves, and feeling shitty about it (though any honest talk therapist will tell you how often they have to fight to stay awake as patients unburden themselves), I can’t help suspecting that, rather than say what they really think or feel, these people are saying what they think other people want to hear. Meaning, what is acceptable, appropriate—becoming.

Dying is a role we play like any other role in life: this is a troubling thought. You are never your true self except when you’re alone—but who wants to be alone, dying?

But is it too much to want somebody somewhere to say something original about it?

Not long after her diagnosis, my friend attended a few sessions of group therapy. Although the sessions took place at the cancer clinic, the group was for patients only, without any professional therapist or other trained person to lead them. She wasn’t surprised, my friend said, when everyone ended up saying the same things. Illness is a common experience, after all. Why wouldn’t people respond to it in like ways?