When I was a kid, my brother and I were allowed to choose kittens from the litter of a stray cat. My mother wanted only one cat for the longterm, so she told us that at some future time one of the two would be given away.
When that time came, my brother’s cat, Percy, was deemed more valuable, with his six toes on the two front paws and seven on the back two. A freak of nature, his saving grace. Amidst my sobbing, we drove Squeaky 50 miles to her new home. Later we were told that one winter’s night she had climbed up into the engine block of the owners’ truck to keep warm. In the morning that was that.
Percy, however, lived a long and crabby life. He died on the operating table and my mother carried him home in a plain cardboard box, tears streaming down her cheeks. I stroked him one last time, then dug a hole in our backyard and laid him to rest.
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But not everyone has a backyard.
More than 80,000 pets have been buried in the Hartsdale Pet Cemetery since it’s founding in 1896. It began as a rural apple orchard in Westchester County and a simple place for a woman from New York City to bury her treasured dog. When word spread, it quickly grew into America’s first pet burial grounds, where human owners could be cremated and live in perpetuity alongside Achilles, Pumpkin, and Cupcake the fish. The apple trees are gone and its crowded picturesque slope now overlooks suburban sprawl. Still, on these three compact acres, it is peaceful with room for more pets and their people.
On one particularly cramped plot, two workers dig a grave, teetering between the existing headstones and monuments, carefully scooping dirt into a half-sized wheelbarrow. A man in his late 70’s passes me on the path to the office holding a small, clear storage box. I rudely fixate on its contents – a cat I think – and forget to say something appropriate like “I’m sorry for your loss.” Further on, I meet Roseanne.
Roseanne tends the grave of her father’s mixed-breed dog, Brandy, who’s been dead for 25 years. Her husband stands by as she arranges the cemetery’s most elaborate seasonal decorations.
25 years seems a long time to pay homage to a dead pet. But the elaborate mausoleums, headstones, and markers tell stories of love, heartbreak and attachment to each animal. Frequently, they reflect strained family relationships, loneliness and lack of communion with other humans. Carefully worded inscriptions refer to them as babies, sons, daughters and grandchildren. Couched in those words, they deserve a long-term, elevated level of adoration, don’t they? Should it matter if they were a cat, dog, horse, crocodile, gecko, fish, bird or tiger?
Love is love.
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Back at home we construct our own version of the pet cemetery. We collect urns of ashes – one for Devon, our cocker spaniel and a second for Piglet, one of our sister-cats. Bobby, one of the guinea pigs, received a lovely riverside burial this spring, where tears were shed and a simple cross erected. We need to prepare a second hole in case we lose Ricky over the winter. And we keep a close eye on an aging Tigger.
Together with the children we experience the expansive love and pain of intimate loss on a smaller scale, while strengthening our hearts for the inevitable human loss that is part of life, that we know is yet to come.