Bucket List

There was this older British guy who visited a couple of weeks ago. I'm going to call him Brit for short. He shows up to the dive shop with his wife and requests to have a "scuba try." We call this a Discover Scuba Diving course. Anyone can try scuba out for the day to see if they want to take a full certification class. This type of private dive is always fun for the instructor to take people underwater for the first time.  So Brit insisted that we do this as soon as possible so he could get it over with already. Evidently his wife requested he try it with her. I thought it was admirable that he was doing this for his wife. When we were practicing a few skills with the scuba gear, he would ask, "Are you telling me to do this?" Of course, the non-pushy teacher in me responds, "Well I'm not saying you have to do this, but yes, it is the next step to going on our first dive." He would throw a few British curse words around and ramble about how bloody nonsense this whole diving thing was to him. So, I had definitely gathered he really didn't want to be there, but he kept right on going and continued through the introduction of scuba.

When we finally made it out on the dive boat, he was still complaining how diving was bullocks and rubbish. His wife continued to smile and remind him to choose to be happy today. Once we got in the water at the dive site, we were finally ready to head down the line towards the reef. On the way down, he looked completely amazed. In fact he looked so amazed that he wasn't responding to any of my hand motions asking if he was okay. We actually came back up out of the water. I told him that he had to respond to me under the water so I would know if he was okay or in shock or something. He said, "We'll bloody hell, of course, I'm in shock. Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?" I smiled. His wife seemed content about his response as well. After he promised to respond under the water, we headed back down again.  He responded better under the water that time, but he was still too overwhelmed to swim. So I ended up toting him around for the dive.

When we resurfaced at the end of the dive, he didn't say much which was a change to his constant rambling. He laid back in the water, his grey hairs floating around the sides of his face. The muscles in his face and neck relaxed. He looked calm for the first since I had met him.

Once we were back on the boat, his wife thanked me for helping them have a great experience. She told me he was sick and did not have much longer to live. They have been traveling around so that he could complete his bucket list. Scuba diving with his wife (one of her favorite past times) was one of the items on his list.

We said our goodbyes a bit later and he thanked me for the experience. I teased him saying, it wasn't so bad, was it? He told me it was one of the best experiences he has had in his entire life.

It was much later in the day when I actually processed everything and I felt the magnitude of the experience I had just had. I took part in someone's bucket list showing them a part of this world they had never experienced before. It reminded me of how blessed I am to be here in Roatan, experiencing God in a very serene way everyday.