It's a heavy question: How would you like to be laid to rest one day? If you or someone you know loves the water, then you might be interested in a unique way some Southwest Florida families are laying their loved ones to rest.
Here’s a look at one mother and son's journey to the Gulf of Mexico, a journey that recently began in an industrial neighborhood in Sarasota.
Just moments after the concrete is mixed, Betty Macnamee gently and gratefully places her hand in it, knowing she was told she would die long before this moment. “I lived to see it done!”
Lived to mix her son's cremated ashes into the concrete that will take him to the bottom of the sea.
“The handprint was to let him know I would always be with him. I fished a lot with him.”
Roy loved to fish, but didn't believe in keeping his catch. “He said ‘why kill something so beautiful?’ recalls Betty.
“He always, always said, ‘catch a fish, give it a kiss and let it go.’” Those words are now etched alongside his birth and death, 45 years later.
“When he committed suicide on Valentine's Day, that was an unbelievable hard day for me,” says Betty.
But when she found this Southwest Florida business offering reef burial, she was sure it was what she wanted for Roy, but wasn't sure it would happen.
“Well first of all, I was like, can I afford it?”
But as she saved up the $4,000 it would take, Betty, who's now on oxygen, was told her failing heart would soon give out. “And then I got really sick and they said I had 30-60 days.”
As Betty sat with us just days before Roy's remains were to be taken out to sea, she proudly told us she outlived the doctor's predictions. Her son needed his mother one more time.
“We were very close, so it's something I had to do on my own. I did it…I made it.”
Three days later, as the boat named the Flying Fish left the harbor in Sarasota, Betty felt the stirrings of a miracle. “I never thought I would see this. This is like a dream come true, it's like the angels.”
Angels, or at least angel fish, hovering near a second boat nearby as the crew lowers Roy's memorial into the water. “His soul is here…he's free, he's free.”
She wasn't the only one wiping away tears. Roy's brother Rick was also aboard. “This was really perfect…he loved the water. No better place for him to be.”
Pricing for the service from Eternal Reefs runs from around $3,000 to $7,500. You can find out more about the reef memorial program here.
