Buckets are for kicking – and for making into a list

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Just as we prefer to talk about ‘the Big C’ as opposed to using the actual word for this most awful disease, so too we tip-toe around the only sure thing in life – other than paying taxes – simply so we never have to use the word ‘death’.

So, instead of actually dying, we talk of people ‘passing away’ or ‘passing over’ or ‘passing on’.

We mention their demise; that they’re gone to their eternal reward or eternal rest; that they’ve slipped away, crossed the Rubicon, were called home, lost their battle – all more gentle ways of describing the cold, hard end of a person’s life.

And while denying death is a futile exercise, you can at least understand why coming up with a euphemism might make it seem just a little less brutal.

But none of that explains why anyone would refer to that process as kicking the bucket.

Indeed, if one common suggestion of its origin is correct, there’s nothing funny about it at all – because it may well come from a time when hanging was the common method of suicide. . . and death was the result when the person stood on, and then kicked over, the bucket.

A slightly more palatable suggestion revolves around an English practice in the Middle Ages where the corpse would be laid out and a bucket of holy water placed at their feet.

Visitors then sprinkled a drop of water on the remains – which explains the bucket part for sure, but not so much about kicking it.

In any event, just why a device for carrying water or animal feed or coal should be seen as a common metaphor for death is anyone’s guess – but that in turn has given rise to the notion of a bucket list . . . .a set of things you want to do before you die.

And for the most part, these appear to be things that you never even thought of bothering with before you found out that your number was nearly up.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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