Losing a beloved feline is always a horrible experience, from the trip to the vet/crematorium to the silent home one comes back to.
A larger than life cat-sized void is ever present. One of the first steps toward closure is memorializing your beloved feline.
Let’s look at some of the ways memorializing your pet can help you cope. Along the way,
we’ll hear from others who’ve experienced a loss similar to yours and explore the various options we offer for memorials for your beloved pet.
Cat Cremation Urns as Conversation Starters
Psychologists all agree that the best way to cope with grief and loss is to talk about it. Talking through your loss helps you both deal with and express the emotions associated with your loss.
A cat cremation urn displayed on a shelf, mantle, or table can be useful as a conversation starter.
Whether your cat urn is a lifelike resin “statue” of your pet’s likeness, or something more abstract like a glass paperweight incorporating the ashes, it’s likely to get attention from visitors and family.
Short Haired Custom Painted Ceramic Cat Urn - No Wings
“Oh, what’s this?”
“That’s my cat urn. It holds ashes from Phoebe’s cremation.”
And the conversation turns to remembrances of Phoebe’s exploits, her favorite treats, or her preferred napping spot in the garden. And that allows you to express your joys and sorrows, giving you an outlet for your emotions.
This heartfelt clearing is important for your emotional healing. You’ll find yourself coping much better and dealing with your grief more easily the more conversations you have.
And you can use a beautiful cat urn to spur those conversations on.
Cat Urns as a Way to Deal With Guilt
For many human losses, guilt is a natural part of the grief process. For pet owners mourning the loss of a beloved cat, this is no different. It’s also perfectly natural and normal.
What if you’d taken Pickles to the vet earlier? What if you hadn’t waited so long to decide to have her put to sleep? How much pain did she endure because you couldn’t let go?
A cat urn can help you deal with this guilt, believe it or not. Psychologists say creating a memorial of some sort where you can express your feelings to the dead is healthy. A cat cremation urn is a small memorial you can place anywhere in your home.
Putting your pet’s cremation urn in a prominent place and talking to it as though it were your cat, still alive and well, can help you unload some of these negative feelings.
Again, it’s the verbal expression of those emotions that leads to healing. These conversations are probably best done privately, but you can talk about these feelings in your chats with others. In fact, you should, according to counselors.
Your other cats, either current or future, may well benefit from these feelings and expressions, too.
You’ll be less likely to act in the same manner the next time a kitty of yours needs medical attention.
Cat Urns Can Create the Centerpiece for a Ceremony
We memorialize our lost loved ones with funerals and other rites. It’s important to us both socially and psychologically.
We have a coffin or a cremation urn right up front, where everyone can see. We create entire memorials and ceremonies around them. We bury the body or scatter the ashes in sacred spaces like cemeteries and mausoleums.
And yet, when we lose a pet, that “special cat” in our lives, we tend to do so quietly, privately, without any ceremony or rite to mark the passing.
A ceremony can be very healthy and healing, say the experts. Especially for the younger members of the family.
If your cat was a family pet, surrounded by children and teens, holding some sort of funeral or remembrance service is a great idea. It allows them to both physically and emotionally deal with the loss.
Deciding on cat cremation urns for your beloved lost pets gives you the opportunity to have a solid, physical object to center your ceremony or rite on. Urns for ashes offer an earthly focus for what may be a very spiritual ritual.
Let them talk about their special friend. Allow them to place the urn in your chosen location. Let them know that while their pet may be gone, he or she will live forever in their hearts and memories.
This gives your children a way of saying “goodbye” in a meaningful and beautiful way. And that helps them to cope with the loss, and begin to heal the grief.
You might be surprised just how it helps you, too.
Cat Urns Can Offer You Time and Space to Heal
No one goes through the grieving process the same way. Even those who’ve experienced more than one loss in their lives often don’t process the grief the same way each time.
Losing our cats is no different. We all deal with our own losses in our own ways. And it’s important that we take and make the time, and give ourselves the space, to do just that.
Pet urns can offer you that time and space. How? It may sound counterintuitive, but they form a constant reminder of what we’ve lost.
Imagine sitting your cat urn in the same sunny window seat where Satchmo took his daily afternoon sunbath. Now, imagine seeing that beautiful urn every afternoon as you pass through the room.
Sit down with it. Have a chat with it. Take a few moments out of your busy day to pause, smile, remember, feel. And then get up and go on.
This “time for reflection” is another way you express and deal with your feelings of loss. It’s an important part of your coping process, as it gives you the time and space you need to do the slow work of healing.
Here’s a story from one of our customers, about how she’s done just that, with one of our glass cat urns:
Absolutely beautiful, more than I could have hoped for. My kitty is now sitting in the window ledge where she would have loved to be and where I can see her and remember her everyday. Such wonderful craftmenship! My kitty passed almost 5 years ago, her wooden box sitting on the shelf brought me no joy...but seeing this sparkling in the window ledge everyday brings “warm fuzzies”. ~ Richelle S.
And here is a photo of her cat urn, sitting on its sunny window ledge.
Half-tone Memorial Sleeping Glass Cat - Contains Cremation Ash in Glass
Cat Urns Can Help You Take Care of Yourself
The loss of a beloved pet is highly emotional. It can feel as if you’ve lost a part of yourself, a big part of your life.
We’ve talked about how it’s beneficial and helps with the healing process to vocalize and even ritualize some of these emotions. For some, however, that’s not enough. They hurt deeply and need more than just talking things through.
Pets, especially cats, can be very intuitive to our emotional needs. They comfort us, make us laugh, seem to know just what we’re feeling and how to improve our negative moods.
Cat urns and glass art pieces can offer us that same comfort. They can remind us that our furry friends wouldn’t have wanted us to be sad or upset for very long, and would’ve been up to their tricks and antics to make us smile and laugh again.
So while it’s natural to grieve and experience sadness and other less-than-sunny feelings, it’s also natural to see a reminder of our favorite class clown and remember to take care of ourselves.
Self-care after a loss is so vitally important to our healing. The body experiences loss and the stress associated with it in several ways:
- Tension headaches
- Loss of appetite
- Fatigue
- Dry mouth
- Stomach aches
Your cat urn or glass art piece can serve in several capacities in helping you deal with the physical toll loss can take on the body.
From becoming a comforting place to just sit and relax, to a reminder that it’s time to eat, whether you feel like it or not, its quiet, gentle, lovely presence and the memory of the swet animal it memorializes can aid in your physical, as well as your mental, wellbeing.
Cat Urns Can Keep Your Pet Close
One comforting thing about pet urns is that they can act as a way of keeping our pets and their comforting presence with us after they’re gone.
Pet urns can sit in a favorite room with us. They’re often placed on bedside tables. Our lighted pieces can serve as nightlights, as in the video below.
And they can even go with you wherever you go. You see, pet urns don’t have to be urns. At least not here at Spirit Pieces.
Two of our artists, Dan and Misha, make pet-specific pendants infused with cremation ash.
Misha makes the lovely paw print piece pictured below. Here’s a lovely message from our lovely Misha:
"Thank you for allowing me the privilege of helping you and your loved ones find peace. Memorial art is my most personal and valued body of work, and I feel very blessed to have the skills necessary to offer this service to others. Your loved one's cremains will be treated as sacred and with as much love, respect, and consideration as I give my own family, friends, and pets."
Paw Print Pendants with Cremains
Dan loves mixing the technical side of glass making with the creative aspects of art, and has this to say about why he does what he does:
“Glass is a very technical medium. From the physical skill-set to the chemistry of working colors, this aspect of the medium fulfills my desire to learn, practice and master. The second is my passion to express myself through glass. These two areas must exist in equal proportions.Without the technical side, I am unable to express myself. Without the passion, there is no drive to continue the path towards mastery.”
Dan makes a wonderful wearable memory piece with a hologram of a cat as well as infused cremation ash.
Cat Hologram Pendant with Infused Cremation Ash
Here’s what one of Dan’s customers had to say about their hologram cat memory pendant:
“We purchased this as a touchstone our son could wear to remember his beloved cat, Nori. It is beautiful, unobtrusive which is important for any middle school boy and helps him know she is always close.
Thank you!” ~ Colin L.
You, too, can keep the comforting presence of your cat close with one of the wearable memorials.
Cat Urns Can Serve Whatever Purpose You Need
Loss is experienced in very personal ways. Our ways of memorializing those we’ve lost, be they feline or fellow human, are just as personal.
And that means that you don’t need a reason, or at least an expressed reason, to decide to acquire some sort of pet urn.
Yes, it can help you cope with your loss. But it doesn’t have to fulfill any of the reasons we’ve given here, as long as it fulfills some need in your life.
So, just as you can take all the time in the world, and you should, that you need to heal and find some sort of new “normal”, you can also have your own special reasons for wanting a cat urn for your lost pet.
There’s no need to explain why you choose what you choose. Not to us or anyone. It’s your personal decision. And no, it’s not macabre or maudlin or refusing to “move on” in any way.
As we’ve seen, it’s actually quite healthy and healing. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. And don’t let them belittle the fact that it’s a Persian in the urn and not a person. You have just as much right to grieve a cat as you do a relative.
We have so many to choose from. Take your time. Make the right choice that meets your heart’s desire. After all, it’s your heart that needs healing most of all.
