I got the call from my vet that Rosie’s ashes were ready, so I went and picked them up and then headed on to have Mexican for dinner and hit the grocery. I ate on the deck separated from everyone else, but sadly, I was the only person wearing a mask. This shit is going to come roaring back and we’re not ready for it.
Rosie’s ashes came in a tasteful little urn in a cloth bag with a bunch of jesusy literature that I just told the vet they could keep. I gotta be honest, I don’t know what the hell I am going to do with them, and need to think about that. I’ll just leave them on the mantle and Tammy will know what to do.
Truth be told, what I should do to honor her memory is put her ashes in five or six little mini urns, and then place one in the middle of the kitchen floor, one at the bottom of the stairs, one at the top of the stairs, one on the runner beside my bed, and one in the middle of the office floor. Then it will really be like she never left and I can trip over her until she finally kills me.
We have a new ad person (the person who redesigned the site), so bear with me a few days. There is a video ad that we are killing that should be taken care of in the next few days, and we have configured everything so that you fatfingered people can use the navigation tools. Watergirl says that the video ads are chewing up people’s bandwidth, which I will just believe her even though I don’t know how. One of those video ads should take far less data than just one normal sized image in our On the Road series, because compression is such that they only push data if a pixel needs to be changed, and it isn’t a constant stream of data like in the old days of internet video. Regardless, you all have spoken, so it is going the way of the dodo. I personally think the ads are much less obtrusive than they were, but I understand that I am a bad person to speak on this issue because I am a master at ignoring shit I don’t want to see. Unless an ad is a popup and fucks with me, I just don’t notice it. I’m just really good at tuning things out I guess.
My Mexican was very spicy. I can feel it in my gut, still. I like that.
In other news, it has rained so much the past few days that earlier today the willow tree looked at me and said the rain was getting to be a bit much.
JPL
I buried Moxie’s ashes with here favorite toy, which was Mr. Bill.
Old Dan and Little Ann
We have our ashes from Mickey, our 1st yellow lab who we put down about 12 summers ago. They are in a little box on our dresser still. I had a mind to spread them around our fire pit. Alas.
Baud
VOR
I buried the ashes of my late wife’s cats, Chip and Dale, at her grave. I hope they are keeping her company in the afterlife. Prior to her death, my late wife picked a pair of cats for our family. The mama cat died in 2019 at age 16 and her ashes are sitting in a bag on my fireplace mantle. I plan to bury her with my wife as well. The other cat will be 18 in a month but is still going strong.
ArchTeryx
A bunch of Jesusy literature? That’s a step up. A lot of these evangelicals insist that animals have no souls, that only humans do.
SiubhanDuinne
We scattered my father’s ashes around the base of a big Japanese maple tree he planted when it was just a baby maplette. A friend brought a bag of sunflower seeds to scatter for the birds. That would have made my dad happy. He was a fucking St Francis of Assisi with all the birds that visited him.
Pete Mack
Video chews bandwith every time you open the sight. On the road only does once, and optionally. Watergirl is correct.
kindness
I scattered my big dog’s ashes by the river he used to love going to last spring. It’s a really nice place.
stinger
John, I appreciate and enjoy your ability to make us laugh even when the topic is a sad one.
trollhattan
Just felt a quake. it was either this,
https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/nc73584926/executive
or this
https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/ew1625784613/executive
lowtechcyclist
We’ve only had cats, so we’ve been able to bury them without any need for cremation. I’m capable of doing basic woodworking, so I’ve made coffins for each of them when they had to be put to sleep, and then dug holes a few feet deep, and buried them in their coffins.
jeffreyw
When we learned that the our new vet had a cremation service we were relieved. Katie can stay with Annie, now.
trollhattan
This made me laugh, reminding me of Gracie, who could stealthily place herself in tripping range but weighted 50 pounds.
TomatoQueen
I have a slowly growing urn collection and a couple of ideas about where to scatter; provided it’s legal, not likely to produce a reenactment of the last scene in The Big Lebowski, and allows humans and felines to be scattered together, all of which seems a bit tricky. My usually law-abiding parents and mom’s sister scattered my grandparents one fine day somewhere in the Antelope Valley, a much beloved photographic spot & apparently illegal but you couldn’t stop Mom, just abet her in furtive activities. I raised hell about her nicking the yellow Lady’s Slipper and she stuck her tongue out at me.
Van Buren
We have two beautiful rosewood boxes of dog ashes on a living room shelf. I don’t think it’s a permanent arrangement.
raven
We have a place in the garden for our pups. I ordered a plaque for Bohdi that will have his image layered in and I make sort of alters out of wheelbarrows. They sell them on Amazon for $60 or so. Here’s Lil Bit’s
And here’s Lil Bit and Raven, Bohdi will go between them.
stinger
Deleted my own self-edit somehow.
My previous pets were all small enough to be buried in the orchard. One of the current ones is a bit larger and I may look into cremation services for him when the time comes, may it be far off still.
The only ashes I’ve had to deal with as yet were those of my mother; we sprinkled her ashes next to my dad’s grave (they have a joint headstone). My sister also put a few firmly and with a touch of spite ON the grave of our grandmother (Mother’s mother-in-law) — Grandma had not been all that nice to Mother when she first married into the family. Grandpa, on the other hand: Mother always said he had been a second father to her.
raven
@VOR: I buried my dad and his lab Molly’s ashes together in the Phoenix National Veterans Cemetery.
karen marie
@Baud: To be fair, it’s planted so close to the house, its roots have probably already taken up residence in the basement.
sab
I have dog ashes in various containers in the upstairs hall closet, so I am looking forward to Coles’s advice on what to do with them.
CaseyL
Placing Rosie’s ashes in mini-containers all over the house as a potentially lethal memorial is perfectly John Cole. So much, it made me sniffle and giggle.
I have a mini-necropolis on my dresser of previous cats Shayna, Jazz, Ariel, and Pamela. Three are in little ceramic vases/urns. Shayna is in a lovely round pewter box with decorations – I call her my Kitty in a Can.
raven
@sab: Look at my solution.
sacrablue
@trollhattan: Yep, we felt it too. Haven’t felt any of the later ones.
Catherine D.
I’ve never kept ashes from pets, but perhaps that’s because I’ve had to deal with dead horses. Slightly freaked out the funeral director when my father died because I was surprised we had to take the ashes.
sab
@raven: I might do that.
OzarkHillbilly
The same can be said of Woof’s ashes, tho I’m not the one with the problem. Me, I’d bury them in a certain location on the property, but I don’t really have a say in the matter. Well, tbh I choose not to have a say in the matter and just let my wife decide because it’s far more important to her. Even allowing for that, I am going to have to back the hearse up to her door before she will decide.
Her parents urns are still in the boxes they came from Spain in and that’s been a decade.
raven
@sab: I got the idea from bathtub madonna’s
Darkrose
@trollhattan: I think it was the one near Stockton. I thought it was a train at first, since our apartment is near the railyard, but then it kept going. Everyone on the library Slack was reporting shaking from Dixon to Fairfield. The cats were kind of freaked out.
OzarkHillbilly
@Old Dan and Little Ann: Heh, I spread Willie Maybe’s ashes on a Shannon County gravel bar. Tried to put them every place he peed on after a pickup full of hounds drove thru.
WaterGirl
@jeffreyw: I am so sorry about Katie. ?
OzarkHillbilly
When my German Shepard Hoss died from bone cancer at the age of 2, I put no forethought into his final resting place. In fact I had planned to just leave him with the vet. I was a hard guy, right?
Sheeeeit. Cried like a baby. And when they asked I couldn’t believe the words that were coming out of my mouth: “No, I’ll take him with.”
And I so I took him out to one of our favorite mushroom hunting grounds with the idea of putting him in a place that never failed to bless us. Yeah. Didn’t make it that far. 160# me decided after a 1/4 mile or so that I wasn’t going to make it to that location 1 1/2 miles deep into the boonie woods with 110# of dead weight and a shovel over my shoulder.
I don’t think Hoss would’ve minded.
raven
@jeffreyw: Aw man, I’m sorry.
germy
A Ghost to Most
My step mother sent each kid a mini–urn of my dad’s ashes, which I thought was strange. Maybe she didn’t want his evil spirit concentrated in one place. One urn got shot out of a cannon. We emptied ours at RMNP, which he liked.
J R in WV
Dad Kept Mom’s ashes in the little plastic box on the nightstand next to his bed for years.
After he died in 2004, I carried his ashes home from Houston in my luggage on the direct flight.
The next summer we had a picnic gathering at a favorite state park, after which just the family and a couple of really close friends joined us to place their remains in the Hills of West Virginia, I will not say where. Not in the state park…
WaterGirl
@germy: Holy shit! How long did the rain last?
jeffreyw
@WaterGirl: Thank you
germy
@WaterGirl:
NY has been getting a ton of rain. We’re upstate, so we didn’t get flooded, but steady downpours anyway.
Shana
My father spread my mother’s ashes in the bay at Annapolis, MD although god knows why. Neither of them had any connection to either the Naval Academy or the East Coast, nor had either of them ever been on any boats to my knowledge. When my father died we dutifully spread his ashes in the same spot and then went to a nice crab-centric lunch.
When our Lightning died we went down to the creek in our neighborhood, which he used to love wandering around in, frequently splashing around in the water or just wandering off into the woods (once returning with the decaying hind leg of a deer) and spread his ashes there. We imagine his spirit enjoying being able to wander at will through it.
germy
Back in 1993 I buried our beloved cat’s ashes, in an urn, next to our wood shed, and I planted a lilac over her.
We sold the house in 2014, and every once in a while I find myself worrying that the guy who bought our property has decided to replace the shed, dig everything up, and has uncovered our pet’s remains.
trollhattan
Wife managed to scatter some of Bruno and Gracie, our Dalmatians, at Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris. Evidently it was a little tricky, as it’s fenced for riffraff control.
PsiFighter37
If your Mexican is still feeling spicy, just wait until it passes out the back end. Alert the fire department ahead of time!
WaterGirl
@germy: Nah, the person who bought your house was a lazy bastard, and your furry guy’s remains are just where you left them.
germy
@WaterGirl:
I hope.
(Furry girl)
WaterGirl
@PsiFighter37: I don’t recall the details, but one New Year’s Eve decades ago, two of us were eating something really spicy at a party, and I had no idea what would happen on the other end the next day.
I’m not sure that has happened since. All I remember is that whatever we were eating was really, really good.
trollhattan
Here’s something you already knew.
frosty
Our last two dogs’ ashes are in a filing cabinet in the basement. We never quite figured out where to scatter them. We’ll have to do so before too long though.
PsiFighter37
@WaterGirl: I had some delicious chili out in Malibu from this little dive spot on PCH. So good, but so fiery. That did not end up well later in the day (I foolishly ate it for breakfast), so I did not try it again despite how good it was.
Xavier
One guy went to his local priest to ask about some kind of service for his dog. The priest told him they didn’t do that kind of thing, but go ask the Baptists down the street, no telling what they believed. The guy asked the priest if he thought $5000 would be an appropriate donation for such a service. The priest responded “My God, man, you didn’t tell me the dog was Catholic!”
WaterGirl
@germy: All my furry friends are referred to in the collective sense, as “guys”. Miss Willow does not seem to mind.
WaterGirl
@PsiFighter37: That was a good call on your part.
What I mostly remember about the morning after was ow, ow, ow, ow, ow.
frosty
@OzarkHillbilly: My mother solved that problem: they wanted their ashes commingled and scattered in the Chesapeake.
My sister kept my Dad’s for 15 years, I found a local funeral home to commingle them and put them in biodegradable bags (having seen Big Lebowski!) and I found an outfit that usually does fishing charters but takes people out on the side.
It worked great, even though we didn’t get a discharge permit and violated some NPDES regs, I’m sure.
Gretchen
I buried my dogs’ ashes in the flower garden.
The local news is all about how covid is running wild in Missouri and they’re out of ventilators and hospital space in Springfield, but I was the only one in the grocery store wearing a mask besides the older black lady cleaning carts.
Gretchen
@frosty: My dad’s ashes came in a plastic box. Our church buried them in their garden but we had to transfer him into a biodegradable box first.
Elizabelle
@trollhattan:
The Covid Belt.
It still shaking in California??
OzarkHillbilly
@frosty: Yeah, my wife’s parents put even less thought into it than I will.
The fact of the matter is, funerals, burials, etc etc are not about the dead. They are about the living. Once I’m gone, I won’t care. My wife? My sons? They might.
So fuck it. Flush my remains down the toilet, but only because what I would actually prefer is highly illegal.
laura
@trollhattan: Spouse and I felt it too. Apparently it was 2, one near Stockton and one on the eastern slope ofnthe Sierra near LeeVining.
We’ve got all our past pets ashes and they go on the Offrenda along with their respective skeleton figures for the Dia de los Muertos party. When spouse and I go, we’ll have all our ashes mixed together and returned to the ocean somewhere along the northern california coast.
frosty
@trollhattan: How did the clusters miss Mississippi?!!
Ruckus
Mom wanted her ashes scattered at sea. We found a fella with a light plane who did this regularly, he got paid to fly and did it by scattering ashes. Not creepy at all….. Still far better than paying outrageous prices for a plot, a casket, a burial.
With a pet’s ashes I’d bet a mantel or in the yard would be good.
Gvg
I thought I was settled in my first house and buried my cats ashes. I have had to move several times since. That’s why I still have the next cats ashes. I should scatter them somewhere public I guess but I don’t feel like it. I keep my cats indoors.
all I can say is take lots of pictures. It’s easy when they are cute kittens, but I tend to get busy and forget as years go by. Don’t get too busy.
Mary G
I didn’t get the ashes of either of my two cats. Don’t even remember being offered them. My mom’s ashes are on the bookshelf – she has a plot next to my dad, but they charge $500 to bury ashes and I know she’d jump up out of her grave that she’s not buried in to slap me upside the head for paying that. I can just hear her saying now – “I only paid $100 for the whole piece of land.” Yes, Mama, in 1968.
I’ve considered trying to bury them there myself, but it’s on a steep hill so that wouldn’t work. I figure I’ll just wait til I die and have my executor cremate me and put us both in one box, that way it’ll only be $250 each. Neither of us has ever been that sentimental about the shell of the body when the life has gone from it.
Gin & Tonic
@SiubhanDuinne: My wife and I want our ashes spread at our favorite beach. If the kids want to visit and remember us, that’s a nicer place than a graveyard.
Amir Khalid
Did anyone here ever try snorting the ashes, like Keef did with his dad’s ashes after inadvertently spilling some?
Ruckus
@trollhattan:
That is a lot of activity in a rather short time and it was felt pretty far away. A six is pretty damn healthy quake
Only big one I was in was Northridge which was 6.7 with two 6.0 after shocks.
Cameron
I do feel it. Even after all the years, after I put Spotty down, it still hurts. We fought like hell (I’d get another terrier in a minute), but I guess it’s a good thing I can’t have a dog where I live.
https://youtu.be/qhT-0eG8kr0
Chacal Charles Calthrop
My first two cats routinely went over my back wall into a historical cemetery which is periodically open to the public. After each died, I saved the ashes of both and surreptitiously scattered them during the next “Open NY” day when the public was allowed in.
Other cat was an elderly adult rescue who had a stroke and died at the vet. I donated her little body to vet science.
dexwood
I have three buried beneath the crabapple tree they so loved for its Summer shade. The two old guys we now submit to will be cremated.
HazyPDX
De-lurking to share what we did with our recently deceased best friend’s ashes: we had some blown into glass art. It’s a custom piece that represents the personality of our JRT, Fiona, in a beautiful way. I love the way you can see her ashes sparkle in the light.
For anyone interested, the artist’s website is soulbursts.com. She is based in Bend, OR and was wonderfully empathetic and creative.
My belated and deepest condolences to all who have lost a beloved pet, recently or not.
HinTN
Abby’s ashes came first (in a bag inside the box from the Rainbow Bridge bunch) and I took them up to the place on the mountain that I supposed she might like. Lincoln’s came next and I poured him into the creek he loved to wade in. Lightning’s came last and I shared him with those two who took him into our family. Just do what feels right, Cole. Go in peace.
Scamp Dog
I still have Biscuit’s ashes on a shelf above the TV nook. When I brought them home, I took her for one last walk around the condo complex.
?BillinGlendaleCA
Nikki and Conni got very nice picture frame urns, they’re above my computer monitor.
Anoniminous
@trollhattan:
Have an earthquake storm happening.
Tim in SF
On the mantle with the collar around the urn.
dww44
Cole, I so enjoyed this post and though I’m not one to laugh out loud when reading, your sentences about what you should do with Rosie’s ashes did make me do that. I also enjoyed the Willow Tree comment and can empathize with it. We, too, are having a wet summer in an area that can be prone to summertime drought. The St. Augustine lawn should be cut every week if the weather dried and would allow, as it becomes too tall and thick when being cut once every other week.
dww44
@frosty:
Same Question I’ve been asking myself. I will continue reading hoping to find the answer. As my sister lives in Mississippi, I can only think that it’s lack of population centers (only Jackson is above 100 thousand) might cause it to not have made the clusters. I don’t believe their governor has been very good about promoting vaccines, but I do not know that for sure.
Matt McIrvin
@dww44: According to the CDC numbers Mississippi has the lowest statewide vaccination rate in the country. You’re probably right, it’s not the focus of this study because the population density isn’t high
…The Texas Panhandle is pretty sparse too though. They already had a big outbreak recently but it seems to be burning itself out now.
Matt McIrvin
I looked at the map again–the “clusters of unvaccinated people” DO involve Mississippi; most of the news articles just didn’t mention it.
FrankTheTank
Dude, you need to think garden project…We started a doggie garden at our place. We have had 5 dogs pass across the bridge over the past 30 years. We buried our latest in a part of the yard she loved to explore. We decided that area would be our dog garden. We started with a few retaining wall bricks to create some elevation, added a doggie angel statue on top of the small wall. And the boss lady has been making stepping stones from concrete and stamping the names of the dogs in them, along with some bedazzling. She has the creative end…I get the grunt work of building the forms and mixing the concrete.
WaterGirl
@FrankTheTank: Pictures, please! :-)
Fraud Guy
We have ashes for over 15 pets from over the years. My plan is to bury them with my wife, since they always smother her when she tries to sit or lay down.