(courtesy Simon & Schuster Australia)
If you have ever experienced the true cataclysmic abyss of grief, you will know, all too painfully, how completely it consumes you.
You often have no choice but to get on with life but the truth is, for a good long while (let’s be honest, forever) everything dies a little with that person no longer in your world and you wonder how you’re going to make life with them gone.
It’s an horrifically overwhelming state of being and Amy T. Matthews captures in all its soul and life hollowing intensity in Someone Else’s Bucket List, a novel which explores what happens to one family, and one member in particular, when the breezy, confident, light of their life dies from leukaemia.
Bree is an globetrotting influencer whose daring exploits in countries around the world and her vivacious love in every and all manifestation had garnered her a million followers and growing, a devoted group of sponsors who love her zest for carpe diem-ing the hell out of everything, and a life that is the envy of everybody who ever dreamed of doing what they want with passion and love.
She has it all until she doesn’t, and she leaves her younger sister Jodie, who’s nothing like her effervescent older sibling, working a 9-to-5 job at an airport car rental agency, wondering how she’ll ever fill the massive Bree-sized hole in her small, failure of a life that doesn’t even begin to measure up to the dreams she had for it in high school when she was an up-and-coming soccer player.
Bree had always been thrilled to be alive. She had a talent for it. Not like Jodie, who had a talent for … what? She hadn’t quite worked it out yet.
It’s as if everything Bree was and all she represented has vanished without a trace.
But then a secretly-recorded video pops up on Bree’s Instagram feed announcing to Jodie, her utterly bereft parents, Bree’s BFF Claude, her grandmother and family friend, Aunt Pat, that if Jodie will complete the remainder of Bree’s fast food restaurant-penned bucket list that the crushing medical debt that the family is struggling to even begin to pay off will be wiped.
It’s an astounding offer, and once the family have recovered from seeing Bree talking to them once again – her mother can’t help but play the video over and over again until Jodie has to intervene, unsuccessfully, to stop her; but honestly you can understand the impulse to watch your dead loved one somehow reborn, even if for just a few minutes – it’s up to Jodie to decide if she will take on this extraordinary challenge.
And it is EXTRAORDINARY.
The remaining items on Bree’s bucket list including a walk-on role in a musical, finishing piano lessons and flying over Antarctica and oh yes, falling in love, which seems a whole factor of difficulty more pronounced that anything else on the list.
At least Jodie, though she’s scared to step out of the small world she’s carved for herself, has a chance of maybe finishing learning to play the piano (she’s truly terrible) or walking onto a musical (it scares her to a debilitating extent) but falling in love?
(courtesy Simon & Schuster Australia)
That seems like a bridge too far, but Jodie plunges on in, overseen by Cheryl from Iris Air, the company which has made the offer and which is bankrolling its completion.
While Someone Else’s Bucket List might at first seem like some light and fun fairytale healing after the horrors of losing a loved on, and yes, there is a rom-com, fairytale element to it which absolutely works, it nails how it feels to lose someone and how, no matter what comes next, you’ll never quite be the same.
Jodie is inevitably changed by the list items she has to undertake, and she is forever transformed into someone entirely new, but Matthews doesn’t pretend for a minute that it’s all some magic wand that makes everything better.
Things do get better, of course, but it all happens, fantastical as it often seems, against a backdrop of truly raw emotions, lives ripped asunder and sadness without end, and it’s this depiction of the reality of grief that fills Someone Else’s Bucket List with so much truth and emotional intensity.
In fact, even in moments where everything feels light and wonderful and Jodie begins to wonder if she might not be able to get on with the entirely messy business of living without Bree, there is a spectre of grief hanging over proceedings, a reminder that while wounds heal, their evidence and cause never truly disappears.
Bree was right. When the piano lessons were over, Kelly Wong would disappear from her life again. And there were only five more piano lessons to go.
‘Yes,’ Jodie said huskily. ‘I’d love you to come.’
Good work, Scaredy Smurf.
Was it? Or was it insane? This sexy ghost from her past was about to witness her complete and utter public humiliation.
Along with more than a million people online …
Oh god.
It’s this focus on grief, which is as far from morbid as you can get thanks to Matthews’ beautifully executed and empathetic writing which strikes just the right note at all times, which elevates Someone Else’s Bucket List to something far beyond a fun romp through some seemingly impossible but important to Bree tasks.
It is a highly enjoyable read that captures nicely what it would be like to find out that there is a way out of crushing debt of both the financial and the emotional kind, that also comes with one last chance to spend some time, albeit at a never-to-be-breached distance with a lost loved one, and how that could change everything for the better.
But it’s also rewardingly weighted with an understanding that grief never truly goes away, though it does ebb from its initial intensity to something you can live with (though barely at times, with it rising up to greet you at the weirdest times), and that while healing happens and life moves on, you’ll never be what you were before.
Which distresses Jodie no end in one singular sense because she’d give anything to have her sister back, but which as Someone Else’s Bucket List concludes, comes to be a comfort of sorts because while not having Bree around is a wound that will never heal, the act of living out the last items on her bucket list transforms everyone, most of all Jodie, into people who know how much life matters, how truly valuable it is and how living it to the absolute end if a gift and privilege and quite possibly the best thing that will happen to you.