Chris, a young contractor who did some work on my home last summer, told me about his most memorable cruise. It came as a result of a question he had asked his wife: “What’s your dream?”

“A Caribbean cruise,” she replied. It was a dream that Chris was determined to make come true: his wife, suffering from Cystic Fibrosis, had only a few months longer to live.
But how to make the dream come true? Chris worked an hourly-wage job at Lowe’s, the home supply store, and he knew he would have a hard time earning enough to pay for a cruise on that salary alone.

Then one day, a couple walked into the store and delivered Chris a solution. They were there to buy fence posts to install on their farm. After making their purchase, they asked, “Do you know anyone who we could hire to install these?” Chris smiled, and said, “As a matter of fact, I do.”

They agreed on an hourly rate, and evenings after his work at Lowe’s, Chris broke the hard earth with post-hole diggers. He did so each day until the job was finished, then took a wad of cash to a travel agent who booked Chris and his wife on a weeklong Carnival cruise.

Chris returned home, laid the tickets in front of his wife and asked, “Now, what’s your next dream?”

During my two decades of cruising, I have met many people whose final wishes were to set sail one last time.

In the summer of 2006, I met two such people in Alaska who wanted only to see the Great Land before their battle with cancer ended. It was not an easy trip for either of them, but both were rewarded with what must have been the most spectacular week of the season, as you can see in the picture below.

“Death tugs at my ear and says, ‘Live, I am coming.’ ” wrote the poet, novelist and essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. It’s not a pleasant thought, but it’s certainly a motivating one to remember that our time on this planet is finite.