For Laura Carney, it began with three pieces of folded notebook paper.
Her father’s handwriting covered each of them, front and back. A list of sixty items, titled “Things I Would Like to Do In My Lifetime!”
At first, she and her brother, who brought her the list, laughed over some of her father’s ambitions in 1978, the year she was born. Some were simply dream travel destinations, from Vienna to St. Thomas. Nearly all were, in one way or another, endearing.
Some in their modesty—“Type forty words a minute correctly,” “Plant an Apple Tree.”
Others in their grandiosity—“Sell millions of dollars worth of merchandise,” “Correspond with the pope.”
A few provided warm insight into the young family man: “Make my wife feel happy, healthy, pretty and young all her life,” “Give my children the most love, the best education, and the best example I can give.”
But the very first item on the list, “Live a long, healthy life until at least the year 2020,” was not to be. Mick Carney was killed in a car accident in 2003, hit by a driver distracted by a mobile phone. He was just 54.
Laura Carney was 25 then, early in a journalism career that would include work for the Washington Post and the Associated Press, and magazines like Vanity Fair, People, and GQ. Her father’s death led her to become an activist, pushing for laws against mobile phone use while driving. At first, she saw her father’s list, resurfaced years after his death, as a new weapon in that battle.
“My main goal then was still activism,” Carney said in a recent interview. “I was very involved in distracted driving activism at the time. And I thought, as a journalist, there has to be a way I can demonstrate that this person who died this preventable death was a real person.”
An actual list of unfulfilled ambitions in a life senselessly cut short? It was perfect.
But the more she looked at the list, the more it spoke to her. The more it meant.
Sixty items. Sixty dreams. In her father’s lifetime, he had checked off only five.
That didn’t seem right. Not just because her father’s life had been tragically cut short, but because she couldn’t believe some of the things he never checked off. Not the most ambitious of the items—“Talk with the president,” “Have my own tennis court.” It was some of the more accessible items that seemed saddest—“Grow a watermelon,” “Drive a Corvette.”
That realization helped her transform her lingering grief into a mission that reconnected her with her father and with herself. Over six years, she completed her father’s list, checking off 54 items from visiting Paris and swimming the width of a river to her first skydive.
The story of that journey became a book, “My Father’s List: How Living My Dad’s Dreams Set Me Free.” First published in 2023, it is the Greensboro Public Library’s “One City, One Book” selection this year.
We caught up with Carney recently, ahead of her Greensboro residency, which will run from October 7 – October 23. Her time in the city will include a series of events built around her father’s list, her mission in taking it up, and what she learned.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
I want to start by thanking you for this book. I went out and bought it at Scuppernong Books in downtown Greensboro and just tore through it. I lost my own mother to suicide about ten years ago now, and I really identified with some of the themes in the book—what it feels like to lose someone suddenly and tragically, but also the way you sometimes get to know someone, especially a parent, after their death.
Thank you. I’m sorry, but I’m glad that you got something from it.
I had no idea that I had all this, I guess baggage is the word for it, that I was still carrying since my dad’s death that I would end up looking at by doing this list. I went at it just really not knowing that. And I think that happens to a lot of people when you have experienced a traumatic loss. You don’t know what you don’t know.
At 25, when he died, I think I almost regressed to age six when my parents divorced. Because it was like a loss that couldn’t be explained. And it’s like, “Oh, here it is. It’s happening again. Circumstances in life keep taking my father away from me.” And I just had a lot of anger about that. And also, honestly—and I think it is normal for a kid to develop this—this belief that the things and people I really care about will just be taken from me with no explanation. Like, that’s just how life is. And of course, that’s not how life is at all, but you develop these coping mechanisms when that’s what your life experiences have been. And they actually can be really detrimental.
You said your original goal with the list was to make it part of your activism. But it ended up changing and going beyond that initial instinct.
I went after turning this into a book, because I thought, “Well, I’m going to show people this was a real person. They had real dreams. Like, here’s what this loss actually looks like, in a real human way, when we make these mistakes on the road.” And instead, it ended up becoming really just this tribute to my father.
I was in this writer’s group that was all women. And they began saying things to me like, “I really didn’t have a connection with my dad like you did. And I’m getting to see what it’s like to have a father by reading your book, because he gave you so much.”
And it made me realize, “Oh my gosh, it’s true.” Even though the time was shorter than I would have liked, and I don’t mean just his life span, but also [because of the divorce], seeing him Wednesdays and Sundays as opposed to every day. The time wasn’t quite as long as we would have liked or as he would have liked either, I think. But I still got so much out of it. And that helped me to start developing this way of looking at the world and at my life with a lens of gratitude.
I think the fact that this really became a memoir and a tribute to your father and your relationship with him is going to touch so many people. The activism is important, but this book has the potential to touch so many people who have lost someone, irrespective of the circumstances of their deaths. As a journalist, I’m sure it wasn’t easy to center yourself and your story this way, but it’s so powerful.
Thank you. Coming from a journalist, that means a lot to me. With my training in journalism, you know, they always say, “There’s no ‘I’ in journalism.”
Ultimately, my journalism background was the main motivating factor in my taking on that activism. I would be in these rooms of people who were these families—of kids, honestly, a lot of the time—who had died in these terrible car crashes. And they would say, “You have to learn how to share your story because sharing the story, that’s what’s going to change behavior.” And I had a college degree in sharing my story. There must be some reason this happened to the family of a journalist. Maybe I could be a voice for all of these people.
And as I was doing these things on my father’s list, some of the things I wasn’t sure about, I thought about those people. I’d wake up in the morning and I’d think, “I don’t know about this skydiving thing…” and then I’d think, “No, I have to do it. I have to do it for those families.” I mean, what is being a journalist if not being a voice for the voiceless?
In the first part of the book, you talk about a connection between what you’re doing and the movie “Back to the Future.” Tell me about how you made that connection.
First of all, it was just a movie my dad loved. We watched all of them when we were kids, so I always associate it with him. But also it’s because there’s this story, I think, at the heart of that first movie, almost an inherited fear, an inherited inadequacy, right?
There’s a son, Marty, and the son fears rejection. He won’t allow himself to pursue his creative dreams of being a musician because he’s like, “I just can’t handle the rejection.” Where did he learn that from? He learned that from George, his father. Obviously, that’s a pretty unique story, where he gets to use science fiction and go back in time and help his dad find a new story for his life.
But it’s a common thing that happens to a lot of people, where you develop your set of beliefs of what’s possible for you based on what your parents thought was possible for them, how they looked at things. And that’s really a lot of what I ended up feeling for myself. I think whatever my dad’s hang-ups were in life that prevented him from doing everything he wanted to do, I think he would not want me to have them.
My dad really supported us. He would always say to me and my brother, “The world is your oyster.” But I think it was something he struggled to believe in for himself.
And in the book, you really do a great job of getting across that in taking this journey, like Marty going back in time in “Back to the Future,” you really were encountering a different version of your father. Marty helps his father gain more confidence and reshape the way his life went. In doing these things your father wanted to do, you were really helping him to do them too.
Well, yes—through me. Because that DNA is strong. They’re still in there. They’re in your heart, like you’re carrying them with you.
Just to recognize that he actually had the impetus to even write down a list of dreams is pretty amazing. He did that in 1978, and the term “bucket list” wouldn’t exist for another, like, 20 years. So he just was very serious about his life and the things he wanted to accomplish. Growing up, I saw echoes of that in him. He would tell us about the book he wrote in the 70s. And he had these little mottos, these little mantras that he would say to us, like “Information is power.”
Through doing this and going back and finding notebooks of his, I learned that when he was younger, he was very into Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, Neville Goddard—these early Law of Attraction people.
And through doing this project for six years, I found I was unlearning all of this stuff that I had adopted, which is kind of what’s become the American way these days, right? Which is, you have to have the house, and you have to have a steady job, that these are the things that make you who you are. And I was relearning that embracing my creativity and going after what I yearned to do, that made me who I am. Following my heart as opposed to my head and actually believing that these things are possible, envisioning them before they happen. It was just completely life-changing for me.
I used to think the things about me that were most like my dad were the things that caused me difficulty. The free spirit, daydreamer kind of stuff. I thought those were interfering with me having a successful life. And as I did his list and I aligned with his dreams when he was a younger man, I started to understand that the things about me that are like my dad are actually some of the best parts of me.
In the book, you find a way to meet Jimmy Carter, the president, when your father wrote his list. You learned to ride a fast horse, you drove a Corvette—something that really scared you. You went sailing by yourself. Did you think of the list, the inspiration to do these things, as a gift from your father?
Yes. I think one thing I’ve been fortunate to do now is teach people about creating bucket lists and developing intentional living in their lives. One of the most important things I learned from this journey that I like to talk about is, you can’t just embrace whatever first definition you’re given. People will be glad to tell you what something is in your life and what it means. What I have found is that life is a lot more neutral than that. And really, whatever we decide something is, and what it means, that has a much stronger impact on us. You can decide how to frame something.
I thought I was doing activism to make a change in the world and to help people. But what I really needed to do was to learn how to tell the story of what happened to me for myself and decide what it meant and what I was going to do with that. And this book is the story of my doing that and all the things I did with it.
