National Pet Memorial Day: 15 Ways to Remember a Beloved Pet
- Sep 10, 2015
- 3 min read
By Jamie Damato Migdal, CEO and Pet Industry Entrepreneur
This Sunday, September 13, is National Pet Memorial Day. I’m not planning to go out and mark the occasion with flowers and a visit to the pet cemetery, but it got me thinking about the many different ways that we do remember our pets, long after they have passed.
My dogs were Sam, Lidia, and The Poodle. Sam was a terrier mix, and the first dog I got as a fully fledged adult. He was only two months old when I rescued him in 1993 from the Montrose dog beach. The people who gave him to me had pulled him and his littermates from a dumpster in Wrigleyville, and they came to the beach that day to find families for the puppies. Sam came home to live with me and my two resident cats, Ollie and KC.
My heart dog was Lidia, a Doberman/Belgian Malinois cross that I rescued from the mean streets of Oak Park in 1997. She was stray, skinny as anything, in heat, and covered in fleas. When Liddie joined me and Sam, our family was complete. She died about a year before my daughter was born, and so when I think of her at the end her memory is tangled up with many other feelings.
And then there was The Poodle, who was by my side for eight very eventful years - I started three companies, sold two companies, met my husband, started another company, got married, had my daughter, and started yet another company. The Poodle was four years old when I got her from Chicago Animal Care and Control, and one of the reasons I brought her into our home was that I wanted Liddie to be able to transmit her behavioral DNA to The Poodle so that she could, in turn, pass it along to other dogs after Liddie was gone. It sounds a little weird, I know, but every dog who lived with Liddie, even for a short time, benefited from that contact with her essential, perfect self. When The Poodle died I knew it was the last of Liddie’s line, and I mourned her all over again.
I’m not one to hang on to mementos like dog collars or paw prints (I’ve moved too many times in the last five years to be very sentimental about keeping things), but I am very thankful that I had professional photos taken of Sam, Liddie, and The Poodle while they were in their prime. There are many ways to memorialize your pet, and I know people who have done all of these things:
Some people cemeteries will also allow pets to buried with their owners. You can even have your pet’s ashes made into fireworks or launched into space. If you have a lot of money sitting around, you can have your pet cloned, cryo-preserved, or taxidermied.
However you choose to remember your pets, I do recommend that you talk to a grief counselor if your usual support network is not enough. I know that many people feel that grief over the loss of a companion animal is not as “important” as the grief they would feel for a human being, and some will run out and get another pet immediately, without allowing adequate time to mourn their loss. But the human-animal bond can be very, very profound, and it is appropriate - and ultimately healing - to treat it as such after your beloved pet has passed on.
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