What to do with a pet when he dies

In My Humble Opinion
21

Thanks, everyone, for the great support. My cat is doing much better and it’s only been a couple days. I didn’t mean to start such a downer thread. Ok, pets dying is pretty sad. But it’s also about appreciating the time we have, right?

The vet says he should live a normal lifespan. But I’ve had him for 9 years and I can tell he’s not the young cat I had once upon a time. He’s on prednisone and it makes him look so bony and old.

Let me share a bit more of the info I got from the vet’s office. My cat’s doctor is a specialist so she works at the emergeny clinic. No wonder the techs know a lot about this type of stuff. So they told me that it will cost about $100 for the cremation. They send the dear departed to a pet cemetary on the other side of town, so you get the ashes back in a couple days. The estimate is, you get about one cubic inch of ashes for each pound of weight. But they gave me a nice brochure of urns & containers. I found a nice looking wooden box with a frame on the top. It costs about $200, though. (Of course, I dropped $700 at the vet’s this week on ultrasound, x-rays, etc.) I liked what you did, dwyr. If I had that kind of talent, I think that’s what I would do. I don’t think it’s ooky but Mr. FV is opposed to it. He doesn’t even want to discuss this topic, which is a whole 'nother problem…

So yeah, I’m leaning toward hanging onto the ashes. I kind of like the idea several of you posted about scattering the ashes in a special place. But he’s an indoor cat and it just doesn’t seem fitting, somehow. I’ll have to think about that some more. When my anoles died, I would bury them in a potted plant. Can’t really do that with a cat. Hmmm.

Thanks for you input, too, CrazyCatLady. Sounds like you know whereof you speak. I’m making some chocolate chip cookies for the staff to say thanks for taking care of my baby. I made them some for Christmas and they were gone by the time my appointment was over!

22

If you don’t feel up to decoupaging (though it’s not complicated, really), you can always just get a small wooden box from a craft store and either stain it or paint it. Then glue a picture to the top, let it dry well, and varnish the whole thing, picture and all (make sure you get a clear-drying varnish). Same effect as the box you’re looking at for a tenth of the price.

Something else I’ve seen owners do is go to the local tack shop and have a small metal plaque made up with the animal’s name and date of death engraved. The plaques come with pre-drilled holes so you can screw them onto the lid of a box. (You can get boxes from the crematorium with the engraved plaques, but the tack shop is lots cheaper.)

I’ve even known a lady who took her indoor dog’s ashes, had a little ceremony to spread them in a corner of the living room the dog liked to piss in, then vaccuumed him up and threw away the bag. I don’t know that I would have done that, but like I said it wasn’t my pet, my life, or my grief process. It worked for her, and that was the important thing.

If you wanted to stick with the potted plant thing, you can always mix the ashes with potting soil. (They did warn you that there are sometimes small pieces of bone in there, didn’t they?)

It’s not really surprising that your husband doesn’t want to talk about what to do with Puss when he’s gone. Thinking about losing someone you love is usually an upsetting thing, and talking about and planning for death is frightening to a lot of people. Treating death as a fact of life not only means accepting that you’re inevitably going to lose your loved ones, it means coming to terms with your own mortality. This is really, really hard for most folks, especially young, healthy people. That’s why so many people die without wills every year. They just don’t want to think about it.

And yeah, between the emergency patients and the internal medicine patients, your vet staff is intimately familiar with every possible method of dealing with a deceased pet. Like I told one of our internists after she euthanized four of her long-term patients in one day, animals don’t exactly come to us because they’re healthy, you know?

23

Years ago a cat which my wife had raised from a kitten finally succombed to old age and was buried in the back yard. Last January we lost another long-time cat and I had her cremated, intending to scatter or bury the ashes on the other cat’s grave. The container is still sitting in a cabinet, as I never got around to it last summer. We had another cat come down with cancer and had him euthanized; he was cremated and the remains placed in a metal urn.

TMI alert:

When my wife died and I was making arrangements for her cremation one of the urns in the catalog was identical to the one we had for Long John (but larger, of course). My macabre sense of humor briefly considered, and then rejected, the image of having matching urns sitting on my mantelpiece.

24

We had a cat once that got hold of some rat poison and died…we realized that there was nothing we could do to bring him back, so… we left him in the alley for the birds!

We thought about taking him to the taxidermist, but they cost too much!

25

There was a story in Louis Camuti’s All My Patients Are Under the Bed where a lady wanted to be buried next to her cat when she died. The pet cemetery wouldn’t allow her to be buried there, and the human cemetery wouldn’t allow her cat. Her final decision was to have the cat cremated and the ashes sewn into the hem of her wedding dress, which she would be wearing for her burial. I thought that was a clever way of getting around things and being near her pet forever.

26

We had our cat Tuffy cremated last year, and I’ve got to say, it was the right decision but when I went inside the vet’s office and they handed me the tiniest little box… well, at least I made it back out to the car before I got about half hysterical.

I know this sounds grim, but I guess I’m just trying to warn anyone who hasn’t ever gotten ashes back. They are so tiny, and it’s all you have left, and if you’re at all like me, that fact might hit you very very hard.

Julie

27

Do you have really good friends who would let you bury in their yard? That’s assuming you don’t go the cremation route.

Over the years my family buried cats in my grandmother’s back yard. We’d pick out a stone to mark the place, right by the fence, and I think six or seven cats, including two or three of her own are there. I buried my first cat Baby there, with a small blanket he liked, his food dish, leash, and with a St. Francis medallion around his neck, from a Blessing of the Animals. Regretfully though I can’t visit anymore, as the house was finally sold, but I know Baby is sleeping peacefully.

If you do go the burial route, and the death is, ahem, scheduled, as in putting the animal down, have the grave already dug. Sounds wierd, but it helps. And I paid for the procedure ahead of time, so that when I brought Baby out I didn’t have to stop and do something so mundane as write a check.

I sure hope your kitty stays with you for a long time to come.

28

I think that it’s interesting that each town in my state has different ordences on pet burial. Our town has no problem with you burying a pet on your own property, so Princess(dog) and Claudia(ferret), both of whom passed on last year, are buried under the same pine tree in my yard. I guess it’s silly, but it feels sort of right to have both my girls near each other forever.

jsgoddess, I took Claudia home to bury after she was put to sleep instead of having her cremated, because I knew that there was no way I could go back for the ashes. Waiting ten minutes for them to put her in a little box was hard enough, I couldn’t go back a different day. So I can easily imagine how hard it’d be to get the ashes.

29

I can just imagine the reaction should anyone dig up our former homes! :eek:

We go the backyard route for anything bigger than a hamster or young rat but mice, frogs, lizards etc. get “Burial At Sea”. Don’t ask.

Our dog had to be cremated but as we we’re seriously broke the local shelter did it. We didn’t get the ashes back. We’ve got pictures though and some great memories.

The more I think about it the more I like the plant idea. If you could mix the ashes into potting soil and plant something, that would keep him alive, wouldn’t it? This is going to sound horrid, but some of the mice I’ve known have gone down snakes. I’m glad they are going to continue and become part of another animal. It makes their death less of a loss if I can imagine that they nourish and become part of something else I’m attached to. Of course you can feel free to totally disagree on that one!

I’d also check out the “friends and family with yards” option.

30

I said I wouldn’t come back, but here I am; I’m morbid; so sue me.

This is a GREAT suggestion, Baker. One of the worst things I ever had to do was to dig a grave for a cat after she had been put down (in-house). Speaking of which, I’d also advise, if you have the opportunity to be present for the putting down, skip it. When the vet couldn’t find a vein I became faint and had to leave the room; it was humiliating and shitty and made the whole thing so much worse.

How law-abiding of you. If I lived in a town so stupid as to attempt to forbid buring my own pet on my own land, I’d risk arrest and do it anyway. Yet another example of pissant local governments attempting to control every aspect of our lives. They must be fought and subverted. Sorry for the hijack but that just burns me up.

31

That’s way too high. We cremated two kitties last year for around $50 each. My husband built a little shrine in the garage and we keep their ashes and photos there.

Otherwise, we bury them in the yard. It’s getting pretty crowded, and I’m always a little nervous that we might dig someone up when we’re trying to put someone down.

The cremation was very nice. Our vet lady sent us a little card and remembered personal stuff we said about the Giant Kitty. Very sweet.

32

You have to keep in mind, Kal, that the $400 in the OP isn’t just for cremation. The cost of the cremation itself is probably $50-75, and the rest is for the burial plot, the burial itself, and maintainence of the plot afterward.

33

Oops. I guess I didn’t read that carefully. I still don’t know why you would cremate AND bury an animal, but that’s what we did with my mom, so I guess you could do it with pets, too.

We only cremate for winter deaths. If the ground is soft, we bury.

34

Update

Couple of things. The husband and I finally had a talk. He has kind of an unusual approach to death. He doesn’t like going to funerals. I don’t understand it, but I know that’s the way he is. He said that he wants to remember our boy as a healthy, happy kitty. If we hang onto the ashes, he will remember the death, not the life. But he understands that it’s important for me to say goodbye, too. So we agreed that when it’s time, I will have Puss cremated and scatter the ashes somewhere special. But he doesn’t want to have anything to do with it. And that’s his choice.

We talked about possible places for Puss to rest. Nothing seems right, because he’s an indoor cat, but I can’t exactly bury him indoors. But there are some places up in the mountains that are special to me. I could either bury him or scatter the ashes up there. I’m thinking ashes are pretty inert, so I don’t have to worry about the legal problems with burying a body on public propery. Not that I’m going to announce it to the forest rangers or whoever, either. So every time I look at the mountains, I’ll think of him. I like that idea. So that’s pretty much been decided.

The thing is, Puss took a turn for the worse this weekend and now I’m scared again. He stopped eating and drinking completely. We managed to get him to eat some baby food yesterday, and we are going to try again today. His doctor will be back in the office tomorrow, so I’m calling her first thing. But we both know, when a pet stops eating, that’s a bad sign. I had to give him his medication last night and he barely put up a fight. That’s a very bad sign. But he slept on my pillow all night. I woke up with a crick in my neck. What a sweetie.

35

I never had to deal with a pet of my own, but was around for two of my friends when their pets passed away.

The first instance was a friend’s golden retriever that had died unexpectedly while she was away. My friend asked me to come along with her for moral support when she went to see Kelly for the last time, take a snip of her fur as a remembrance, and make arrangements for her cremation. (Her teenage kids had had to handle bringing the dog to the vet, who kept Kelly in the cooler until my friend got home.) It was of course very sad, both of us were trying to hold back the tears. While the dog was being cremated, we sat with the funeral director of the pet cemetary handling the cremation to discuss options for the container to put the ashes in. He pointed up to a shelf in his office… and the two of us gaped at the site of one particular container, which was essentially a tall, black, squarish tin with a Chinese garden decoration on the outside. My friend had a container just like it in her kitchen, only she kept cookies in it! :eek: We looked at the shelf, looked at each other, and then through tears started to laugh, tried to cover it up, and only laughed harder… The funeral director politely excused himself while we dealt with our bout of hysterical laughter, thinking how appropriate it would be somehow to put the ashes of a dog well known for her food snatching in something that looked like a cookie box. In the end my friend picked a nice, understated wooden box that sits on her mantle, but we still fondly recall the last laugh that Kelly gave us.

In the second instance, my best friend’s cat was nearly 17 years old and had been ailing for a long time with diabetes. When she did finally die, my friend had her cremated, and is keeping the ashes for the day when he settles in his own home so that he can scatter her ashes in the garden. In this case, a few of us decided to do something special, since we all knew that Josephine was not long for the world and that my friend would miss her terribly when she was gone. As a surprise for my friend’s birthday - the last before Jo left us - we commissioned another friend, a wildlife artist, to paint her. He did an absolutely wonderful job - he captured her in one of her typical poses, and you can’t see the toll the diabetes had taken on her by then. Her portrait hangs in the living room now, where everyone can still see her in bright colors every day.

Faye V, I hope your little guy has a long life left in front of him. How is he doing?

36

sunfish, thanks so much for the great story. What a great way to remember your dog. I called my cat’s doctor first thing this morning and she had me bring him in right away. She’s going to put him on an IV and keep him overnight for observation. She said his blood tests came back the same, so at least he’s not worse. She wants to play around with his medication and see if that helps. I brought a HUGE batch of chocolate chip cookies I baked to thank her and her staff. She was so grateful, I started to get embarrassed!

On another topic, I have these weird feelings of guilt for being upset at how much he is costing me! I mean, he’s worth it, but it’s going to take years to pay off my credit cards. Keeping him overnight is going to cost another $500. That makes $1500 since January. I spent about $3000 on him last year, too. Even if I got insurance now, it wouldn’t cover his preexisting condition. I mean, what am I going to do, let him suffer? I just wish it didn’t cost so much. I’m going to need to get a second job to pay for his medical bills, and then I’ll never see him. It sucks. But I can’t really complain because at least I still have him. My coworker spent a couple grand on her dog, and he ended up dying.

37

Faye, honey, there’s absolutely nothing in the world wrong with considering the financial consequences of pursuing treatment. Nothing at all. Money is an immutable fact of life, and you ignore it at your own risk. You have to consider what’s best for your family as a whole as well as for Puss when making your decision. These bills aren’t going to get any smaller or any less frequent, trust me. If it’s putting that much of a financial strain on you guys to keep going, it might be time to consider letting him go.

It’s a heartbreaking decision, I know. It makes you feel like fifty different kinds of crappy loser to decline treatment for financial reasons. I can’t tell you what you should decide, because I don’t know you, or your finances, or Puss, or his medical history and prognosis. I can tell you, however, that not one single person in that clinic will think one whit less of you if you decide to throw in the towel. Even with an employee discount, most of us have had to make the same decision at some point. It sucks dried sweat off a dead goat’s ass, but we just don’t make enough to spend several thousand bucks on our pets. If you guys decide to stop, your vet and her staff will understand.

38

This isn’t supposed to be funny and could probably be posted in inappropriate laughter thread…but i can’t help giggling as I write it -it’s actually very sad but it’s one of those “it will be funny later stories”. Well, onward…my biological father died about 12 years ago, he was cremated and I picked up the box at the crematorium and put it in a small suitcase I had thinking I would do something with them later; then my really large housecat died and I had him cremated and picked up the box and put it in the suitcase; then my stepfather died and we had him cremated, I picked up the box from the funeral home, by this time the suitcase was full so the funeral home gave me one of those velvet, drawstring bags with the box in it, then my other housecat died and I had him cremated and picked up the box from the funeral home; then three years ago, my mom died and (no I’m not kidding here - I’ve had a bit of a bad run the last few years, especially with my mom which still can’t really talk about), you guessed it, she wanted to be cremated so picked up the box, got a nice velvet bag, etc.

All of which rests under our bed (my husband really only knows about the cat and my mom) - well, he probably knows about the rest but he vanishes whenever I clean under the bed. When I moved in with him when we were married, he was moving the suitcase and I said “be very careful with that”, he said “why, is there bodies in it?”. I never did answer the question but he put it down pretty fast.

Anyway, I have all these boxes and bags - mainly because it sort of freaks me out to open the boxes when it comes time to dump the ashes, if I ever get the courage to open the boxes (I’ll put it in a nearby lake which everyone loved, well, except the cats)…

This is only the second time I have told this story…I kinda hoped it would sound better this time around, but nope!

39

Geez, I kinda wandered on that last post:I should have also mentioned that, before my Bear died (second housecat - 19 years old), the vet’s bill was approximately $4,000 over about six months. I only kept going as long as Bear wasn’t in pain and was having a relatively good time in between check ups. As soon as he wasn’t having fun any more, I, along with my vet, ended it.

You have to keep in mind that you have to do the best for your pet - you owe him/her that - not the best for you. It’s hard but it’s right.
I miss my Bear - it’s been five years and my heart still aches.

40

When my sweet Bobcat died 2 years ago I had her cremated. Her ashes were returned to me. About 6 months later (when I could bring myself to do it) I opened up her favorite stuffed animal and sewed a pouch with her ashes inside the bear.

I seems strange to many people, but it still helps me alot. Whenever I am missing her or feeling sad, I sit down with the stuffed animal. I can feel her ashes in the pouch and I don’t feel so alone.

I also have a small ‘memory shelf’ (or shrine, whatever it’s called) dedicated to my sweet Bobcat. It holds a picture of her, a small cat/angel statue, a bit of fur and her favorite toy snake.

Everyday, I miss her. But I will never forget her and the light she brought to my life for 13 years.