Most of what gets written about this is either a list of charity telephone numbers or a reassurance that grief takes as long as it takes. Neither is much use on a Tuesday evening when the house is wrong and you cannot settle to anything. What follows is an attempt at something more practical, written by a family firm that arranges pet cremations and has therefore spent a great many years on the telephone with people in exactly the fortnight you are in. It is not counselling and it does not pretend to be. It is an account of what tends to help and what tends not to.
The Fortnight Nobody Prepares You For
The first few days rarely feel the way people expect. A good many owners report feeling oddly efficient at first, making arrangements and answering messages, and then coming apart in the second week when everybody else has moved on and there is nothing left to organise. That sequence is so common it is almost the norm, and knowing it is coming takes some of the alarm out of it. Nothing has gone wrong with you if you were fine on the Thursday and not on the following Wednesday.
Sleep, and the Small Hours
Sleep goes first for most people, and the hours between two and five in the morning are where the worst of it happens. Very little can be done about that beyond knowing it is temporary and not treating it as evidence of anything. Where it persists for weeks rather than nights, that is worth mentioning to your own doctor, who will not think it strange. Bereavement over an animal is well understood in general practice now, whatever you may assume.
What to Do With Their Things
The bed, the bowls, the lead by the door. There is no right moment and no right order. Some people clear everything the same day because they cannot walk past it, others leave the bowl where it is for a month, and neither approach is healthier than the other. What causes trouble is doing it to somebody else’s timetable, usually a well-meaning relative who thinks it will help. Do it when you decide to. If it turns out to have been too soon, most things can be replaced and the ones that cannot, such as a collar, are worth keeping back deliberately rather than by accident.
Telling People, and the Remarks That Follow
You will get at least one comment that lands badly. It is usually a suggestion that you get another one, occasionally a comparison with a human bereavement that is meant kindly and does not read that way. People say these things because they have no script for it, not because they think little of your animal. Deciding in advance on a short sentence you can give to colleagues, something that closes the subject without inviting discussion, saves a surprising amount of effort in the first week back at work.
The Animal Left Behind
Where there is another animal in the house, they will very often change. Some search, some go quiet, some become clinging, and a few appear entirely unbothered, which upsets owners more than the searching does. Keeping the routine steady matters more than anything else you can do. Whether to let a surviving animal see the body is a question with no settled answer and no evidence either way worth relying on, so it comes down to what you can bear.
When the Grief Seems Out of Proportion
People ring here embarrassed at how badly they are taking it, particularly where the animal was small, or old, or had been ill for a long time and the death was expected. Anticipated loss is not lesser loss, and relief sitting alongside grief is not disloyalty. Where an animal was the main structure of somebody’s day, and for people living alone that is often exactly what they were, the absence removes the shape of the day as well as the companion. That is a substantial thing to lose and it accounts for a great deal of what people describe as an overreaction.
Where Genuine Help Exists
Two organisations run free and confidential bereavement lines staffed by trained volunteers, one at Blue Cross and one at Cats Protection, and both are worth knowing about. Their listeners do not offer therapy and say so plainly, which is to their credit. Details are on their own websites. Beyond that, your own veterinary practice will usually know what is available locally, and your doctor is the right route if the difficulty is going on longer than feels manageable. None of these are our services and we would not present them as such.
What We Can and Cannot Do
We arrange cremations. We do not provide counselling, therapy or anything of that kind, and any business telling you otherwise is stretching the description of what it does. What we can offer is a telephone conversation with somebody who arranges these things every working day and will not hurry you, straight answers to practical questions, and the assurance that nothing you ask is unusual. That is a narrower offer than some sites make, and it is an honest one.
The Practical Decisions Underneath All This
Grief and paperwork arrive together, unhelpfully. An individual cremation service means one animal on their own, identified at every stage, with ashes returned to you personally rather than posted. A communal cremation service means several animals cremated together, with no ashes returned to anybody. Families discover that second point too late far more often than they should. Where a death is expected rather than sudden, arranging things before the day removes the heaviest decision from the heaviest afternoon, and our page on planned euthanasia sets out how that works alongside a vet.
When There Was No Vet Involved At All
Where an animal simply died at home overnight, nothing about the arrangements becomes more complicated for it. We can explain a cremation service following natural death before anything is agreed, so the sequence is understood in advance rather than worked out under pressure.
What It Costs and Why
Three elements decide the total, namely the service chosen, the weight band the animal falls into and a collection band based on the length of the journey out from Burscough. Work outside standard weekday hours costs more again. The pet cremation price list holds the current figures. Cost is a legitimate consideration and nobody here treats it as a measure of attachment.
Where We Work From
Everything we do happens at one crematorium, at Burscough near Ormskirk in West Lancashire. Families are collected from home, or from their veterinary practice where that is where the animal died, and anybody who would rather bring their animal to Burscough in person is welcome to. The way each animal is tracked, from the doorstep through to the point where ashes are handed over, is described on our our standards page, and reading it answers a question most people are too self-conscious to ask.
Writing Something Down
Later on, and there is no schedule for it, the Remembrance section of this site will take a photograph of your animal together with whatever you want said about them. Reading what other households found the words for is quietly useful in a way that is hard to explain until you have done it.
If You Would Rather Speak to Us
The number is 01704 776976. Ask whatever you need to, including the questions that feel too small to trouble anybody with, because those are usually the ones keeping people awake. If a telephone call is beyond you today, our contact form reaches the same team and will be answered properly.