Anvil Centre plays host to the Bucket List Festival on June 11, which encourages people who are facing a life-limiting illness or advanced age to plan for their future.
The full-day event will feature a variety of presentations from medical professionals, financial advisors, lawyers and more.
Coquitlam’s Sharie Ford will be sharing her story of what it was like to live out her bucket list with her husband John after he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in 1996. He was given a five per cent chance of survival for two years. He beat the odds and lived another 19 years until he passed away in 2015.
“The diagnosis caught us totally off guard,” she told the Record, adding at the time, her sons were 14 and 16 years old and the family had been on a trip to London, visiting John’s side of the family.
“We made it home and he was hospitalized the night we arrived, at 10:30 p.m. on June 13. The trauma of that still at times upsets me,” Ford explained through tears, “because anybody who sees that kind of terminal diagnosis, it’s more than a roller coaster. Your whole life just gets turned upside down.”
The Fords came across the Bucket List concept after joining the Crossroads Hospice Society as volunteers. They attended a similar event to the one happening in New West in North Vancouver in 2013.
“Our lives actually changed because we started living more intentionally. It changed to a mindset where we were consciously started opening up ourselves to more risks than we had to prior,” the mother-of-two said.
That included travelling more, including a 75-day cruise around the Pacific, despite being advised not to. The family also held a living wake for John in October 2014.
“John said, ‘That’s pretty cool. I’d like to hear what people say about me,’” recalled Ford. “It was tongue-in-cheek … Our son said, ‘Dad, if we’re going to go through something like this, we want you there. As a family, we sat around and said, ‘You know what, we need to celebrate life.’”
Other aspects of their bucket list included having John write his own obituary (he was a regular columnist to the Tri-City News). Since 2009, it remained in a sealed envelope at the bottom of a basket by the computer.
“He had asked me that I would never change a word. (It) gave him peace of mind … because he got to say what he wanted to say,” said his wife.
Ford hopes people get inspired by her story and create their own list and embrace death as a fact of life.
“You become peaceful with that knowledge and what you do is capitalize on every single day that you have,” she said.
The Bucket List Fest at Anvil Centre is on Saturday, June 11 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tickets cost $25 each. To register, visit crossroadshospicesociety.com or call 604-945-0606.
