Some wonderful (and weird) ways to remember your pet
It's something I don't like to think about but I know it's true, one day I'll have to say goodbye to my furless family. I wish we could all go to that big all-you-can-eat treat buffet in the sky at the same time but no soap.
So I thought I'd help my pack out by researching some of the many ways they can remember me while at the same time help themselves deal with their broken human hearts. Some of these ideas are sweet, some are unique and some are downright weird...
Ways to memorialize your pet
Create a website to honor your pet's life. Great example: My Golden Prince
Create a memorial video yourself or have one made: Dogcacher.com
Create a memory book: Scrapbook.com
Have a portrait painted from a photo: PetsPictured.com
Buy a garden memorial or a memorial stone: Eternal Paw Prints
Make a book about your pet's life: Pet Story
Write a letter to your pet, frame it and display it on your wall: Pet frames
Donate to an animal rescue group in your pet's name: List of pet rescues
Unusual ways to memorialize your pet
Create gold or silver jewelry containing your pet's ashes: Precious Pets
Create a diamond or gemstone from your pet's carbon or ashes: LifeGem
Have your pet's ashes made into fireworks: Angels Flight
Launch your pet's ashes into deep space: Celestis
Have your pet's ashes made into a vinyl record: And Vinyl
Have your pet’s ashes poured into bullets for one last hunt together: Holy Smoke
Get a tattoo of your pet from ink mixed with her ashes: TattooFinder
Have your pet mummified: Mummification of Transference
Articles & Resources
Adult books about dealing with the death of a pet
Association for Pet Loss & Bereavement (APLB)
Children's books about dealing with the death of a pet
Dear Labby: Advice on grieving for a pet
Dear Labby: Pet mummification?
Grieving turns to giving when a family loses a pet
National Pet Cemetery Directory
Memorial Products and Reviews
Morris Animal Foundation sympathy cards
Nelli Designs Memorial Candles
Pet memorials and headstones directory
Have you memorialized your pet in a way I haven't listed? Do you know of a resource that can help pet owners deal with their loss? Leave me a comment and let me know!
Obama's Dog Blog sources: DogTime.com, Oddee.com
I also wanted to include a link to this article about what makes us different: http://www.bestfriendservices.com/store/pc/Pet-Urns-We-Stock-What-We-Sell-d16.htm
Posted by: Best Friend Services Pet Urns | 04/02/2013 at 04:15 PM
I wanted to let you know about Best Friend Services.
Best Friend Services was founded in 2003 in order to help people grieving the loss of a pet. Dealing with the stress of losing a pet doesn't need to be compounded by having to research pet urns or the cremation process.
Our intent is to make Best Friend Services the first and only stop you need to make for the products and resources you need to say good-bye. Any feedback or comments are greatly appreciated.
Sincerely,
Christopher "CJ" Johnson
Posted by: Best Friend Services Pet Urns | 04/02/2013 at 04:13 PM
I don't like the way owner PLAYS with their ashes.
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Posted by: Multi-Di@g Access J2534 | 04/24/2012 at 08:44 PM
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Posted by: Individual Voluntary Arrangement | 08/19/2011 at 10:04 PM
Does this mean BO is dead? We sure haven't heard anything about him for a looooooooooog time.
Posted by: katablog.com | 08/02/2011 at 09:21 AM
I don't suppose I have read anything like this before.
So nice to find somebody with some original thoughts on this subject.
Posted by: Cheap UGGS | 08/02/2011 at 02:52 AM
Really a good way for us to remember our pets.
Posted by: sandy | 08/01/2011 at 08:22 PM
For some older children or persons who may be grieving losses these days, I will permit myself to post 2 links:
1. a friendship song from YouTube named "The Moon in the Waterfalls", which was sent to me a few days ago by some friends from Romania. The song says something along these lines: "I had dreamed to become a cloud, I had wished to become a gray-haired mountain, with stars around me, and to hear the moon fall in the waterfalls, to feel around me brooks and streams, and to hear birds' songs ... but when a pine tree falls, stars also fall ..."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2uQWZv8s6A
2. an English translation of an old Romanian folk ballad named "Mioritza" (pronounced: "me oh 'ritz ah", meaning: little ewe, or female lamb), in which death is allegorically represented as a wedding with and within nature. One of the versions of this initially orally transmitted ballad was first published in writing in the middle of the XIX-th century by Romanian classical poet & diplomat Vasile Alecsandri, and was later translated in English by American Pulitzer prize winning poet W.D. Snodgrass:
http://spiritromanesc.go.ro/Miorita%20-eng.html
Posted by: Rudolph Aspirant | 07/30/2011 at 04:33 AM
Warning ! Long, long comment. (I do not know if I have any excuse for it, other than I am posting from the Kingdom of Norway, where the weather is kind of cloudy and sad.)
I do not know if this article was already listed (sorry, I didn't have the chance to click on all the above mentioned research links). I found it generally informative:
http://www.suite101.com/content/grieving-the-death-of-a-pet-a9731
I can also personally recommend to all old enough to be able to read and understand simple questions about feelings to participate in one of the pet loss psychological research initiative that one can find on-line, for example here:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=gIGLM_2fzAQAZ9HW7NGZzkPA_3d_3d
(Just google up "pet loss questionnaire", or "pet loss survey", or "pet loss psychological on-line research", something like this.)
I absolutely need to mention that in general most research studies done on-line will require active participants to be OVER 18 years old, and this has to do with general Ethical Guidelines for research, nevertheless, if a parent has a child who is coping with the loss of a pet, the parent himself/herself could participate in the questionnaire and choose some of the questions and adapt them to the level of understanding of the child, and thus get a chance to OPEN up a discussion with the child about the child's FEELINGS about the loss of his or her pet.
It is IMPORTANT in any grieving process, once the initial shock is over, to encourage verbal expression of one's feelings, actively Naming those feelings, Defining them (for oneself and others), Describing them (like in a story linked to those feelings), Comparing them (to other feelings or other previous loss situations), Reflecting about them at a meditative level, &Thinking about them at a cognitive level.
Not all people are either old enough or good at to Verbally express one's feelings. (Or some may be so affected that they are still at a loss for any words.) Some may prefer Drawing a picture, or Painting a painting, some may prefer listening to music or a song, or, if truly creative, even Composing a song, or a poem. Some children could even try to enact a little play using dolls, plush or plastic toy animals, or puppets going to a funeral. It is important for children to understand what is difficult even for adults to understand sometimes, that terrible and scary, yet irreversible thing that is called Death, at the level that that child is capable of understanding it.
Funerals, and other rituals are also important, IMHO, and children should be allowed to participate in them. It may be interesting, helpful, and even educative to a certain point, if a child may learn that different cultures may have different types of funeral rituals: for example, did the pet have an Irish sounding name ? Well think about Irish wakes. Or think about the Scottish bagpipes. One can find on YouTube such examples, and one could arrange a little funeral ritual according to the child's wishes.
In some cases the pet is lost and no one shall find it, and no one knows what has happened to it. These cases are more difficult because of the uncertainty. One may even wish, after a certain time has passed and all retrieval efforts have been completed, in order to soothe the child's anxiety and grief, to even try to explain to the child that one could call the pet "officially lost", or, in some cases, (if signs may point in that direction), even "officially dead". One can actually draw up a "legal" certificate of "official loss of a pet", enlisting the child's help to do so, helping the child come to terms with the irreversibility of what has happened and giving it some written authority (the vast majority of children DO have a grasp about authority), and also giving that paper to the child to hang on to. If one has decided to "declare the pet officially dead", one could draw up a "death certificate", and even arrange a funeral by burying one of the pet's favorite toys or belongings. (Obs. ! Even if in the family's tradition previously deceased persons or pets have been professionally cremated, I personally would NOT recommend "home based" "cremations" of objects, because I just do not generally consider it either safe nor educative to burn stuff around the house in the presence of childrem. I just said it just in case.)
Depending on a child's age and the family's traditions, one may wish to discuss the spiritual/religious aspects of death, or even the child may ask: "do pets go to heaven ?"...Im general I do not think it is the moment to start explaining fine points of certain theological points of view about whether animals have souls or not, or whether those souls go to some places after the animal dies, or even if they are to be reincarnated at a later time. The child, or actually the grieving person, (because, IMHO, I tend to think that we might ALL be children in the face of death), is NOT asking to receive Scholastic Instruction, he/she is asking to receive some possible Clarification, Reassurance, maybe also a degree of Guidance in order to find out more precisely:
a) the location of that pet after the pet is gone;
b) the possibility of ever feeling spatially close in any way to that pet again.
I personally (and this is just about me...others may have other feelings or thoughts about this) think that:
a) if a real living and breathing pet has been in close communication with a human during that pet's life, it is OK to think that that pet too may have a soul;
b) Paradise (Heaven) has been once explained to me personally by a 6 year old girl as a place looking like those puffy clouds where the Care Bears from picture books live sometimes...I liked that image so much, that I have personally decided that it will be so for me personally as long as I live;
c) it may be quite possible that pet souls actually go for a while and find a "summer place" on one of the stars or planets visible from Earth, because they like to see the ones they loved and that loved them continue to LIVE. It is very important for pets to know that their human friend continue to LIVE and to grow up healthy, and go to school, and get nice jobs, and be nice people after the pet dies, so they find that summer cottage over there just to check on Earth below. And it is OK to try to look up a star or a planet on a star map and find that star or planet on the sky and know that the pet's soul is there and continues to CARE about the well being of the human who was left behind. And it may be interesting for someone to also try to find out whether that star or planet is visible just from the current geographical location of the living human left behind, or would it be visible if that human travelled to somehwere else on the opposite Hemisphere, and does it depend on the season too ?
Posted by: Rudolph Aspirant | 07/30/2011 at 04:18 AM