At some point somebody has to say something. It might be a few lines at the bottom of the garden, or a card for a colleague whose cat died at the weekend, or nothing more than a reply to a text you've been staring at for a day. These pages are about finding those words. Where they quote anybody, the quotation is attributed and the copyright checked, which is why some of the best-known lines about pet loss appear here as a name and a link rather than as a block of borrowed text.
The reading, in order
- Writing a pet eulogy
- Poems worth reading
- Quotes, checked and attributed
- What to write in a card
- What to say out loud
What these pages keep concluding
Read all five and the same thing keeps happening. The borrowed line is what people reach for and the specific detail is what actually works: the third stair, the tennis ball carried for nine years, the cat who sat on the warm bonnet and would not be moved. A poem says something true about loss in general and can't say any of that. So most of these pages end up pointing the same way, at whatever you can write, or keep, that is about your animal and no other one.
And after that
The stage that follows this one is remembering: Ashes, a stone, a garden, a keepsake. The practical decisions nobody prepares you for, and what each one actually costs.
Written by Craig Fearn, Small Goodbyes.