When Laura Carney found her father’s 1978 bucket list, scrawled on a page torn from a spiral notebook, she knew immediately it was special.

Her dad had written it well before his passing, but it gained significant emotional heft after he was gone. Sydney Page reported Laura’s next steps in The Washington Post.

Michael “Mick” Carney, a Delaware resident, wrote the bucket list and was in the process of fulfilling it when he was taken in 2016 by a Route 422 car crash in Limerick.

From the first moment she saw the tattered pages, Laura knew she had to finish it.

“This is what I’m supposed to do,” she told her husband.

She embarked on a six-year quest to finish 50+ experiences her father targeted.

The bucket list included tasks from the simple to the challenging:

• Grow a watermelon
• See New Orleans, Las Vegas, and Paris
• Correspond with Pope Francis

“The first couple ones that I did happened organically,” Laura said.

One was “Run 10 miles straight,” which she accomplished via a marathon she had already planned.

“Talk to a President” was tough, until Laura discovered that Jimmy Carter was teaching Sunday School in Georgia, making him meetable there.

Upon completing the adventures, Laura commented that although some treks were solo, “…it didn’t really feel like I was doing things alone. Because I knew my dad was with me,” she said.

The full account of this bucket list success is at The Washington Post.

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One of the Carney bucket list items to be completed was speaking with a president;
Laura was able to check this one off for her dad by catching up with Jimmy Carter’s Sunday School class.