The Best Ideas For A Pet Memorial
While there are many beautiful memorial ideas out there, we realise purchasing such a sensitive gift can be a risk if the memorial is for a friend or family member rather than yourself.
People like to keep their pet’s memory alive in different ways and while one person may appreciate a unique gift and find it a wonderful gesture, another may find the idea upsetting and not something they are comfortable displaying in their home or on their person.
However, the memorial gifts and ideas featured below are some of the most common gestures and so if you’re unsure of your recipient’s tastes, these should be relatively safe and sympathetic gestures to go with.
Memorial Stones, Urns or Ornaments
If looking for a memorial for your own pet, there are plenty of ways to celebrate their memory with ornaments, stones/grave markers and urns for keeping ashes in. There are so many different designs of these available and so if you look hard enough, you’re bound to find something which reflects the beauty and love of your pet, which can become a sweet and lasting memorial within or outside your home.
If purchasing as a gift, there’s also things like shadow boxes and poetry picture frames, which make more appropriate sympathy presents, allowing your loved one to place their pet’s photos and items into a memory box.
Objects and Jewellery
One of the most distressing parts about losing a pet is simply being unable to touch and hug your companion again. That’s a hole in your life that’s difficult to replace, and so finding a memorial item you can touch and feel can help bring you some comfort.
The most traditional of these would be a piece of customised jewellery commemorating your pet’s memory such as a necklace or bracelet which you can read and touch when you are missing them. However, there’s nothing to say it couldn’t be a larger, more interactive commemorative object.
Memorial Gifts & Ideas To Avoid
Although any idea that involves commemorating and celebrating the love of a lost pet can seem like a thoughtful and beautiful one when it first occurs, not all pet memorials are a sensible option.
For example, although getting a tattoo can be a fitting way to pay tribute to your pet, many people these days choose to mix their pet’s ashes into the ink… which is not a good idea. Any reputable tattooist should reject this notion, as this is essentially putting an unhygienic foreign body into your skin and can potentially give you a nasty infection.
Things like floating lanterns are also a bad idea as these can have awful effects on the environment. Although they display a nice metaphor for your pet’s soul, they could harm other animals such as birds or even sea creatures as they tend to not be biodegradable.
Finally, if buying something as a gift, we would also suggest trying to be sensitive and intune with how the recipient is feeling and more crucially how they might be planning to commemorate their pet themselves. It’s probably not your place to send them an urn or memorial stone, as these feel like deeply personal objects that someone grieving will buy for themselves if they feel they need them.
Things To Consider
When purchasing something with so much emotional gravitas behind it, you need everything to be perfect and of the highest quality.
Crucially, you also want whatever you buy to boast durability and longevity, to ensure it will be a long-lasting memorial that stands the test of time.
Here are some features to pay especially close attention to:
Materials
Particularly if jewellery or a memorial stone, you need your gift to be made of the most premium and high-quality material. Memorial stones need to be made from a strong material resistant to scratches and preferably treated with weatherproof coatings if they are to be kept outside in the garden. Jewellery also needs to be carefully constructed and well put together, as if it falls apart or breaks easily, it will be even more heartbreaking than normal.
Personalisation
If you want a memorial gift to carry more emotional weight and feel more special than a standard Clinton’s Sorry For Your Loss card, personal customisation is a must. This allows you to write your own words and feelings, describe your pet on their own terms, or more commonly just insert their name and a paw print on an ornament.
Practicality
While any memorial gift is usually a beautiful and much-welcomed gesture, it’s often important to think long and hard about where a piece fits into a home before you buy it. For example, there’s no point buying a pet memorial stone for the garden if you have a yard, because it just won’t look particularly beautiful or moving when sitting on a paving slab or patio.
Therefore you need to make sure there’s a perfect spot in your home just waiting to be filled with love and remembrance before you buy any ornament!
Size & Weight
If buying a memorial stone, the size and weight of a gift can be important, as placing it outside or inside your home shouldn’t be a difficult task. A seriously heavy ornament can also be potentially dangerous if it topples or falls from its spot and isn’t it best that your gift remains a memory of your pet rather than that time you broke your foot!?
Size is of course also crucially important for things like frames or jewellery, where getting the wrong measurements will mean a poor fitting and a memorial which never sees the light of day.
