William Shatner, 95, says his will asks for a tree over his grave

William Shatner has thought about what comes after. The 95-year-old actor says his will includes a very specific wish: a tree over his body.

"I have in my will that there will be a tree over my body," Shatner said. "The whole family is doing that."

What happened?

Shatner made the remark on Thursday, November 12, at the 2026 End Well Summit, a conference about death, dying and living well, held at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. He appeared with his daughter Melanie Shatner Gretsch, 62, to talk about the time they both faced stage IV cancer.

It began in 2022, when Melanie spotted a lump on her father's cheek. A family doctor told him to massage it, thinking it was a saliva gland. A month later it had grown. Another doctor told him it was melanoma, a form of skin cancer, and that it had to come out immediately.

Around the same time, Melanie was diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer. She went through a double mastectomy, 30 radiation treatments and several rounds of chemotherapy with HER2-targeted therapies.

"I'm coming over"

Melanie recalled calling her father late one night, crying, to say she was scared she would die. She heard the sheets rustle as he got out of bed. "I'm coming over," he told her.

He drove to her house and gave her a big hug. "This is going to be a blip in your life," he said. "It's going to pass and you're going to get through this."

Shatner said facing the illness alongside his daughter made death feel real. "We all dimly realize that we're going to die in the future," he said. "That perception, that immediacy changes everything." He added that you can keep the fear in check and make it work for you. "We lucked out. It worked for us."

What came before

Shatner was already a headline name in 2021, when he flew to space on Blue Origin's New Shepard at 90 and became the oldest person to do so. In late 2024, he and Melanie were declared cancer-free.

In April this year, he had to deny false online stories claiming he had stage IV brain cancer. He wrote on X that the stories came from monetized Facebook groups and often used AI images of him. "None of these stories are true," he said, and urged fans to trust only his verified accounts.