Deathcare Professionals are Sharing Their Personal Parting Stone Stories
In its first five years of existence, Parting Stone has gone from an awe-inspiring idea to a spunky startup to a thriving global phenomenon. Since its start in 2019, the company has earned an astounding amount of accolades from not only those families, but also from the press, the scientific community, and even from the brilliant business minds of TV’s Shark Tank.
Thanks to Parting Stone founder Justin Crowe and his team, over 9,000 grieving families in the U.S. and Canada have found a unique and beautiful peace in being able to cherish, hold, and share their loved ones’ cremated remains in a clean, lovely, solidified form.
Parting Stone is more than just an option to display in the selection room. It’s more than a way to bump up your add-on revenue. And it’s way, way more than a passing fad. You don’t have to take our word for it; there are plenty of deathcare professionals who have discovered the profound impact Parting Stone can have on your families, your business, and, perhaps most importantly, on you … just like it had on them.
Lacee Green, Foundation Partners
Last summer, Lacee Green had to make the heart-wrenching decision to euthanize her 14-year-old cat. After his cremation, Green created a shadow box in his memory, and included bits of his whiskers and fur along with other keepsakes. But his cremated remains sat on her dresser for months, untouched.
“His ashes became meaningless to me; I didn’t want to put them in the shadow box,” Green, who is a funeral director and location leader at Ponderosa Valley Funeral Services in Parker, Colorado, says. It was shortly after joining the Foundation Partners team that she was introduced to Parting Stone, and decided to send her cat’s cremated remains to the company — a decision that has had a transformational influence on both her professional and personal lives.
“Yeah, he was ‘just a cat,’ but these stones have made such a difference,” Green says.
Today, Green often takes her cat’s solidified remains out to her patio with her because in life, he loved laying in the sun. She also uses her cat’s story and her experience with Parting Stone as a segue to introduce the families she serves to the concept of solidified remains. Apparently, it’s an effective technique, as Green has had more families choose Parting Stone than any other funeral director in the U.S. As a result, she’s heard a lot of stories about how these stones are like nothing else the deathcare profession can offer.
“In my 20-plus years of serving families, I have never had a family come to pick up an urn and be excited about it,” Green says. “My families send me pictures of what they do with the stones. They’re excited to share it with me, and I love that. I’ve never had a family send me a picture of their cemetery space or their mausoleum and say, ‘Look where we put mom’s urn.’ That doesn’t happen.”
As Green explains, this ongoing, unusually upbeat interaction with families also provides the opportunity for her to reconnect with them to offer grief resources, answer their questions, and maybe even talk about their own funeral plans.
“It’s great that I can keep building that rapport with my families,” she adds. “I found such value in them, and I started to see my families’ experiences in their emotions and their feedback. I am just so thankful that the company is out there and that families have another option. I’ve never had one family come back and tell me they did not like their Parting Stones.”
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Jill St. Laurent, Legacy Funeral Group
Like Green, Jill St. Laurent is an experienced deathcare professional who, like you, has witnessed the extraordinary rise in cremation rates over the last few decades. As a funeral director based in Texas, she learned about Parting Stone and began introducing solidified remains to her families. But it was a recent personal experience with a direct cremation by an out-of-state funeral home that made Parting Stone an integral and important part of her life and career.
“My grandfather passed away in Nebraska,” St. Laurent, who now serves Legacy Funeral Group as the Training and Development Coach, explains, adding that the Nebraska funeral home that provided direct cremation services did not offer her family Parting Stone. “By not showing all the options, my grandmother left with just his cremated remains.”
The next week, though, Parting Stone’s Crowe appeared on Shark Tank, where he secured a deal with sharks Lori Greiner and Kevin O’Leary. It just so happens that St. Laurent’s cousin is an avid fan of the show, and immediately asked his family’s resident deathcare professional how they could send a portion of their grandfather’s cremains to be transformed into solidified remains. As Legacy offers Parting Stone to the families they serve, St. Laurent made that happen immediately, and was pleasantly surprised by the process.
“They kept me in the loop, which was something that is almost unheard of in our industry,” she says. “It’s just that customer service level of just reaching out to the family along the way and through the process to say, ‘Hey, we still have your loved one. Here’s where we are in the process.’ That’s what I appreciated most about Parting Stone.”
St. Laurent isn’t the only family member who has been impressed by Parting Stone. Many of her cousins who received some of the stones have found amazing ways to make new memories with their grandfather.
“It opened the door for all of us,” St. Laurent says. “We’re continuing his life. He was a traveler, so his stones have traveled to six states; he’s gone back to his farm in Nebraska. He’s gone on trips, and so there’s just a little piece of him everywhere. It continues his life story. That’s what I take to the field at Legacy. This is something we owe the families.”
David Bailey, Carriage Services
Although in his role as Sales Enablement Partner for Carriage Services, David Bailey doesn’t have the opportunity to share Parting Stone with families, he’s heard plenty of inspiring stories about solidified remains from the funeral homes under his company’s umbrella. Even so, it wasn’t until last year that Bailey had his own experience with Parting Stone … an incredibly meaningful and memorable journey that brought him closer to his late father than he could ever imagine.
“When my dad passed away in 2015, it was the biggest loss I’d ever experienced in my life,” Bailey says. “I loved my dad more than any human that had ever crossed through my life. So I made a decision that I would take one last trip with him across Canada, where I was born and raised, and spread his ashes at places that I remembered sharing joy with him.”
A cancer diagnosis, a divorce, a pandemic, and the passing of his mother frustratingly kept putting that trip on hold; but in the meantime, fate intervened in the form of a friendship with Parting Stone’s Justin Crowe. After speaking with Crowe, Bailey decided to join his father’s ashes with his mother’s and have them transformed into solidified remains. This resulted in about 80 stones which Bailey divided equally among his parents’ four children. With his allotted 20 securely in tow, Bailey finally set out on his BMW adventure touring motorcycle on a trip that he’d planned more than eight years earlier.
“I left from Houston and rode up to Vancouver, starting at my sister’s house,” he shares. “All along the way I wanted to visit family and old friends who could tell me stories. Who could help me remember. I wanted to retrace the roads we’d traveled together, places we’d lived, where we camped, the city we had called home, and the church that was so significant in my parents’ lives.”
Over the next two-and-a-half months, Bailey traveled from Vancouver on the west coast of the country to Newfoundland on the east, gathering stories and leaving stones. His journey provided opportunities to connect and reconnect, make new discoveries, and learn more about his roots than he could have done any other way. He chronicled the final stop in an incredibly touching Facebook Reel.
“It was the trip of a lifetime honoring lifetimes,” Bailey says. “Working in an industry where I help other people process their grief, I realized that I needed to be very, very deliberate in processing the grief in my heart and bringing this whole chapter to a conclusion, when on that last day I could say, ‘I honored you with everything that was in me.’ I had this little bag of Parting Stones in my tank bag on my bike, and it was like, ‘I’m carrying you with me. We’re on this one last journey together, Dad.’”
What’s your Parting Stone story?
Bailey, St. Laurent, and Green entrusted Parting Stone with the remains of some of their own most treasured and beloved individuals, and each came away with stories that highlighted their best memories of those loved ones, but also provided opportunities to create new ones. This is part of the genius and beauty of solidified remains, and it’s exactly what you can provide for the families you serve.
In the coming months, we’re going to share more of the stories gathered from Parting Stone families, including much more about David Bailey’s touching odyssey across Canada with his late parents. In the meantime, Justin Crowe and the Parting Stone team would love to help you and your team offer your cremation families the same type of unforgettable experience. Click here to fill out a retailer application and visit www.partingstone.com to learn more today!
