What Final Wishes Taught Me About Luxury
As a young person growing up in the rural South, I experienced more responsibility than most. I lost both of my parents early, and by the time I was 22, I was a single father raising two children on my own. I did what I was supposed to do: went to work and came back home again, all while struggling to create a life that reflected a happy family.
But I had dreams.
As a child, I read extensively about Alaska. I studied volumes of encyclopedias, read novels such as Gentle Ben and The Call of the Wild, and even searched voraciously through past editions of National Geographic for anything related to the tundra far, far to my north.
But Alaska was just a dream that I never imagined I would realize until more than two decades later when, as a single parent for the second time, I saw an ad that kept popping up on my social media feed offering a summer job in Alaska. It was almost taunting me, daring me to click.
But I knew better. After years of doing the responsible thing as a parent, I knew that doing something for myself, realizing a longtime dream, was out of the picture.
The company I had been working for was sold, and the jobs were moved out of state. I received the congratulatory severance package, and the idea became less of a dream and more of an opportunity.
I actually clicked on the ad.
But it was still just a dream as I nervously filled out my information and sent it away to some far-off corner of my curiosity. A few weeks later, I was interviewed for the job over the phone. Then came an offer for a position just outside Denali National Park.
I could see my dream in front of me, but responsibility always came first.
After consulting with my children’s mother and her parents, I began to see it as much more of a possibility. Then a reality. It was just a few months in Alaska, I thought. My kids would be okay.
And they were.
But that summer in Alaska changed who I am. Deeply. Spiritually. Completely. I had gone to Alaska seeking adventure, but I came home with a calling.
While working in a gift shop and guiding tourists on a daily nature outing, I learned more about Alaska than I ever could through encyclopedias and magazines. I learned that Alaska was wild and exciting and that people came there from all over the world for many different reasons.
Some, like me, came to fulfill a lifelong dream. Others, I would learn, came to prepare for a final journey.
I don’t remember the first time I heard it, but I know I must have heard tourists make essentially the same remark several dozen times:
“When I die, I want my ashes scattered here in Alaska.”
It didn’t register immediately. It didn’t even register after I got home, but it stayed somewhere in the back of my mind. I understood enough to know that people were talking about finding rest in the beauty of a place that had made them feel alive.
I had learned, without really knowing it at the time, that some destinations aren’t merely places people visit. They become part of the story of who they are.
After that summer, I came home. I returned to my life as a responsible parent working in a career that seemed safe, but Alaska called to me every day.
A year later, my brother passed away, and the universe gave me more questions. I made arrangements to have his body cremated. Several days later, the funeral home called and told me, “Your brother is ready to go.”
I went to the funeral home confused. Ready to go where?
It was surreal when I was handed a plain blue plastic box and given a firm handshake.
I remember asking the funeral director what I was supposed to do with the ashes. He told me to do whatever I wanted to do. I asked him what I was allowed to do. Again, he offered no real advice.
It wasn’t that he was being uncooperative. His professional role had ended, but mine as the brother had suddenly begun, and I had no idea what to do next.
I eventually left my brother’s ashes with his pastor to be kept at the church where he had led Praise and Worship. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else with cremated ashes.
At the time.
But ideas have a strange way of developing when you least expect them.
One morning, more than a year later, in the middle of the pandemic, I woke up with what seemed like the craziest idea: I should start a company that scatters ashes in Alaska.
I didn’t know if it would work, but I had a love for Alaska and a keen sense of serving people, so I gave it a try.
Three months after receiving my mortuary license and business license from the State of Alaska, I was on a single-engine Cessna bush plane, carrying my first client’s ashes to a glacier high on Denali, near the summit of North America’s tallest mountain.
It was early April, and the dry cabin I had rented in Talkeetna, Alaska, still had several feet of snow between the front door and the privy. When I boarded the bush plane, the pilot assured me that the engine oil had warmed sufficiently for our climb toward the glacier.
I was nervous.
But once we landed on the glacier, I felt a peacefulness I don’t think I had ever experienced before. The vast open landscape swallowed my nerves, and I was able to carry out the first of what would become many final wishes by releasing ashes into the wild.
The world on that mountain opened beneath some of the deepest blue skies I think I have ever seen. The wind was calm. The air was crisp but not frigid.
It was a perfect setting, and I had not expected that.
Two months later, I found myself on a chartered boat in Icy Strait near Juneau, scattering ashes for another family. When we left the dock at Auke Bay, it was rainy and cold. But as we neared the point where the ashes were to be released, the clouds broke and the sun peeked through.
As I released the last of the ashes into the freezing water, a rainbow formed off the side of the boat, bringing an immediate calm to the moment.
On the way back to the bay, the wildlife seemed to come alive. I saw Steller sea lions sunning themselves on a remote island, and a couple of whales breached the surface of the now-calm water.
Through the years, I have returned to Alaska many times to scatter ashes, but these final journeys have also taken me far beyond Alaska.
I have scattered ashes along Route 66, where a son asked me to take his father on “one final road trip.”
I have scattered ashes along the Blue Ridge Parkway, where a daughter wanted her mother to find peace in the mountains she adored.
I have scattered ashes near the shores of Lake George in upstate New York, where a niece told me her uncle had spent peaceful summers in his younger days.
And in Arizona, we carried out a memorial for a client whose parents had found warmth not only in the desert landscape, but also in the community they discovered there after retirement.
I still find people looking at me strangely when I approach TSA at airports and announce that I am traveling with cremated ashes. The TSA agents are always professional and understanding, but fellow passengers sometimes give me quick glances as they try to figure out exactly what I am doing.
On flights, I always carry the ashes with me in a carry-on bag. It’s discreet, and I don’t normally strike up a conversation by telling my seatmate that I am carrying someone on a final journey.
The TSA and the airlines have rules for traveling with cremated ashes, but there is no handbook for the emotional etiquette of sitting on an airplane carrying someone’s ashes.
I think it’s better that way.
It’s not about me. It’s about a family that has trusted me to carry out something personal and deeply emotional.
Normally, by the time I board a flight or begin driving across the country, my job is already more than halfway complete anyway.
The hardest part is the planning.
Different locations have different rules. Some states regulate ash scattering more heavily than others. Some national parks allow scattering under certain conditions or with permission, while others prohibit it in particular areas or circumstances.
Over the last six years, I have researched regulations for scattering on land and at sea. I have learned airline and cruise line rules. I have spoken with foreign consulates and local park managers. I still sometimes hear surprise in the voices of officials when I explain why I am calling.
But for the most part, as cremation has become increasingly common in the United States, people understand what I am asking.
Even when the answer is no.
One thing I have discovered more than anything else during these travels is that luxury doesn’t have to mean something lavish when it comes to final wishes. It doesn’t necessarily mean a first-class seat or a five-star resort.
Luxury can mean finding rest in a place that once gave you peace.
That place might be one of America’s national parks, somewhere along Route 66, the waters of the Gulf, or a campsite deep in the woods.
The things we cherish when we are most alive, the happy places that make us enjoy life, can become the places we think about when it is time to say goodbye.
Those places define us.
They shape us.
They remind us what life was about.
The longer I do this work, the more I realize that a final journey is really a final wish.
Some families imagine one mountain, one coastline or one national park. Others imagine a journey across America itself. Some simply want peace on a glacier. Others imagine one final cruise through the Caribbean, with a loved one’s ashes released into the sea.
Luxury at the end of life is a choice.
It is the ability to say, “Take me back to the places where I felt most alive.”
Sometimes luxury is knowing that someone will carry a person you love thousands of miles, handle every detail, stand in the right place at the right moment, and bring back a piece of an experience you could not make yourself.
Luxury in life and luxury at the end of life may seem completely different, but perhaps they are not.
At their best, both are about choice, experience, peace and happiness as much as they are about wealth or extravagance.
And that is why, after all these journeys, I still cherish what I do and what these extraordinary places can bring to families saying goodbye.
- About the Author
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Stan Reese is the founder of Eternal Legacy Service, a memorial company specializing in destination ash-scattering experiences. A lifelong traveler and photographer, he has visited all 50 states and more than a dozen countries, exploring trails, national parks, and remote landscapes throughout the United States and abroad. His travels include walking the Camino de Santiago through Portugal and Spain.
He is currently developing two of his most ambitious memorial journeys: a centennial tour along the length of historic Route 66 and a year-long journey through all 63 U.S. national parks, with ash-scattering memorials planned at parks where regulations allow.
