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Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson do a really good job in the movie Bucket List.
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This is a story about two older men who are diagnosed with cancer. They get to know the doctors very well, but in the final analysis "modern medicine" cannot cure them. Hum, that sounds familiar. The Bucket List is their list of things that they want to do and the places they want to see before they kick the bucket.
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After the doctors informed me of my situation at first I cried a lot. Why me, and all that stuff. But it didn't take me too long to figure out that all this negativism and complaining was just sapping my energy (and wasting the final chapter of one's life).
Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson do a really good job in the movie Bucket List.
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This is a story about two older men who are diagnosed with cancer. They get to know the doctors very well, but in the final analysis "modern medicine" cannot cure them. Hum, that sounds familiar. The Bucket List is their list of things that they want to do and the places they want to see before they kick the bucket.
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After the doctors informed me of my situation at first I cried a lot. Why me, and all that stuff. But it didn't take me too long to figure out that all this negativism and complaining was just sapping my energy (and wasting the final chapter of one's life).
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So I started writing my own Bucket List.
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I guess I went to Paris, France at least 10 times, maybe more (my father was born in Paris, Texas). The same with London which is probably the world's finest city. On several different occasions I walked along various parts of Hadrian's wall in northern England. I saw the Peak District, Glastonbury, and I went on several pigrimages to Liverpool and the Beatles sites like Penny Lane and Strawberry Field.
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I visited Rome where I saw the Colliseum, the Apian Way, and I spent a half a day wandering around Hadrian's villa just outside of town. I went to Galileo's home town of Pisa and visited the leaning tower where he performed his experiments on gravity, then Florence where Galileo is buried, and on down to the very well preserved ancient Roman cities of Pompei and Herculaneum just south of Naples. I absolutely fell in love with Berlin and went there several times. I don't have enough fingers and toes to count how many times each I visited Koln/Cologne, Dusseldorf, Xantan, Munich, and Trier, Germany all of which are absolutely delightful places. Several times I visited Frankfurt and Heidelberg, Germany where I lived in the early 1970's when I was in the U.S. Army. These visits were sort of like going back to my roots - my youth.
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Antwerp, Brussels, Tongeren, and Liege, Belgium became almost like a second home to me. Edinburg, Scotland; Dublin, Ireland; Barcelona, Spain; and the Swiss Alps are all truly wonderful and amazing places full of nice people.
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And just like in the movie, after seeing a bit of the world, I finally came home to my roots in America. My primary goal was to try and renew my ties with my sister and my son. I have been back in America for about 18 months now, and I would say that this final and most important part has been rather more successful than I anticipated. And I have formed a really good friendship with my little black partner.
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Antwerp, Brussels, Tongeren, and Liege, Belgium became almost like a second home to me. Edinburg, Scotland; Dublin, Ireland; Barcelona, Spain; and the Swiss Alps are all truly wonderful and amazing places full of nice people.
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And just like in the movie, after seeing a bit of the world, I finally came home to my roots in America. My primary goal was to try and renew my ties with my sister and my son. I have been back in America for about 18 months now, and I would say that this final and most important part has been rather more successful than I anticipated. And I have formed a really good friendship with my little black partner. -
The leukemia is continuing to progress. My immune system is now probably about 85% ineffective. It isn't able to fight off the most common of bacterial, viral, or fungal invaders. Even simple tooth decay has become a real problem. And there are now so many ineffective white blood cells (which refuse to die at the appropriate time, like other cancerous cells) in my blood that they have begun crowding out the red blood cells which carry the oxygen to all of the body's tissues, and the platelets which help the blood clot when one gets a little cut.
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This is all just part of the normal program. We all are born and we all die. We can't change either of them very much. The important part is what one does with the time between your birth and your death. I still have a fair amount of energy, and I'm still laughing a lot and enjoying virtually every day. I intend to stay around as long as possible; as long as I can enjoy it a bit.
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But if it all becomes intolerable and no fun any more, then I plan to move on to the next chapter. That is what the Good Lord made .44 Magnum handguns for. I don't want to be like one of those cancerous cells which just keeps hanging on, refusing to die even when your time has clearly come, and you can no longer be useful or happy. I don't want to be the last one to leave the party.
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This movie The Bucket List is a complete fantasy. But it is funny, and it has a good message. I recommend it highly! Especially so to anyone who has been diagnosed with incurable malignant cancer (or their familes). The truth is that we are all terminally ill; we are all going to die. So maybe this is a good movie for anyone to see.
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