Sea Burial, Living Funeral, Washed up body...

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/cerabino-south-floridas-dead-tourism-on-the-rise-917681.html

The most famous South Florida tourist of the month is a dead guy.And an inspirational dead guy, to boot.

They say you can't keep a good man down. And if that's the case, Daniel Scott Lasky, 48, of Hickory, North Carolina, has proven his goodness in the most literal of ways.

Lasky arrived in Fort Lauderdale for a final fishing trip with his family a week ago. He made the trip while being packed in dry ice and laid out in the back of a van.

Lasky, who died of Lou Gehrig's disease a day earlier, had wanted to be buried at sea during a deep-sea fishing trip to Florida with family and friends. And he was getting his final wish.

Except that he didn't stay down.

The weighted body was lowered to the depths about four miles offshore as planned. And the group that had come to see Lasky off had fished as planned.

But a day later, Lasky's body popped up to the surface of the Atlantic. And this being South Florida, he was immediately assumed to be a homicide victim.

You might think this is ghoulish. But considering the rest of Lasky's journey toward death, it's just another fitting false ending.

Lasky, who had been a salesman for Nabisco, didn't want a funeral after he died from this degenerative disease. He wanted his funeral while he was alive.

And he got one last December, calling it a "living funeral." He wanted it held before the degenerative disease would rob him of his voice, so he could talk to the people who showed up to bid him farewell.

The area newspapers covered his living funeral. People from his past showed up, including his old high school girlfriend.

Lasky talked about the pleasures of smoking cigarettes and watching his favorite TV show, Survivor.

"I want to greet people and thank them for the time we shared," Lasky told The Charlotte Observer.

He said the living funeral would help him die in peace.

"It'll be something for me to hold onto," he said. "Something I'll never stop dreaming about - until the day I'm gone."

But he wasn't the goner sort of guy.

After spending a couple of months in hospice care in Hickory, he didn't die. So he got kicked out of hospice, sent home to make room for patients who were less likely to linger at death's door.

And then he hung on for eight more months before dying at home and going for that final Florida road trip.

And so if anybody's corpse was going to pop up after being buried at sea, it makes sense that it would be Lasky's.

"The detectives say they never remembered anything like this ever happening before," said Veda Coleman-Wright, the public information officer for the Broward County Sheriff's Office. "The wife said the body was weighted."

Lasky's wife, Sharon, has declined to talk about the near-burial at sea.

So for now, Lasky's body is at the Broward County Medical Examiners Office, where it's awaiting its next move.

The sea burial and the body washing up on shore is sure odd and rare to see, but a living funeral?