Small Goodbyes

Stage 3 of 4

Remembering

Ashes, a stone, a garden, a keepsake. The practical decisions nobody prepares you for, and what each one actually costs.

This is the stage nobody is ready for, because it arrives as admin. There is a decision about cremation to make within a day or two, usually at the vet, usually while you can barely speak. Then, weeks later, there is a box on a shelf and no obvious idea of what it is for. These pages take those decisions one at a time and say plainly what is involved. Where they quote a price it is somebody else's price, from a named source with the date we read it, because what a crematorium or a stonemason charges is not ours to state.

The reading, in order

And after that

The stage that follows this one is the portrait: The one thing we make: a painting of your animal, from your own photograph. What the styles are, what the formats are, and whether it is worth it.

Written by Craig Fearn, Small Goodbyes.