Pittsburgh Nesties
psychgalbride
member
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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Pet Cremation (North of city), Pet burial, and explaining death to an almost 4 year old
We lost our oldest kitty this morning and need recommendations for pet cremation. Our old vet whom we had been driving back to always did a memorial paw print for us. Recommendations, please. And while we are discussing pets. I'd love a vet recommendation for Cranberry/Wexford since we should probably find someone much closer to home now.
Ted really wants to bury her in the backyard but I just do not think it can happen with these freezing temperatures. Horrible timing. Not ready to deal with all the questions Madeline has this time around. We lost my 19 year old kitty last summer but she didn't really understand/ or could not vocalize her concerns due to speech delay. This time she is full of questions and I'm struggling. Any guidance would be greatly appreciated. She has not dealt with a death of a family member or attended any services at that age of course.
Re: Pet Cremation (North of city), Pet burial, and explaining death to an almost 4 year old
They are almost at the corner of 19 and Rochester on the left when you are heading North. (For comparison of businesses across the street on the right when heading North on 19 they fall between Old Navy/Gymboree/Streets of Cranberry and Mad Mex Ichiban).
I can't help with the vet or cremation questions, sorry. Though if you have any issues transporting your pets, we use Vet to Pet for home visits and love them. I think their office is north of the city.
As for questions, I just do my best to answer them all simply and honestly. You know your kid best, but in my experiences with my kids, death hasn't made them sad enough to cry until age 6/7. My son (5) was sad when we lost our cat in November in that he missed her, but not sad enough to cry.
YMMV, but it seems to me that it is more upsetting for us than it is for them. The best course of action now is to be open and honest, without going into more detail than necessary, so when topics get trickier in the future they won't hesitate to come to us with questions,
Hugs!
I also think it is ok to acknowledge their question but let them know it is difficult for you to answer and you would like to think about it some more and that you can talk about it tomorrow if you are not quite sure how you want to respond.
Dd is 6 so a little older. She had her first exposure to pet death when she was 4 and my parents dog died. We let her ask questions and explained as best we could which sometimes meant saying we didn't know. We don't go to church so we aren't really religious. So this brought up a lot of questions about death and what happens afterwards. I would talk to her about different beliefs (heaven, reincarnation, etc) and that people believe different things and we don't really know. I have to say that after the dogs death there were a lot of death talks. There have certainly been more after our cat died. These are hard questions for us to deal with ourselves so it's definitely difficult!!
For our cat, we let dd lead the way. We brought her home and buried her in the backyard. I know my parents had issues with cold temps and burying but my dad did what he could. Luckily it was a 70 degree november day when our cat died. Anyways, dd wanted to see her so we let her. She wanted to put in a toy with her and decorated her "coffin" lid which was really just a cardboard box. Again we let her do whatever she felt she needed to do. We had little funeral outside and the next day she wrote her a card and tied it to the tree near her grave along with flowers.
Other things we've done: she wanted a toy cat that looked like ours which I was luckily able to find. This helped when she was at school. Her teacher would let her hug it when she was feeling sad. I also got her a frame to put a picture in her room. She had asked for this as well. We picked out a kitty book. I also ordered the book Cat Heaven. It's sweet and I have a hard time reading it without sobbing but it is a nice book.
It's been almost 2 months and it's still hard. She will be sad some days out of nowhere saying she misses our cat. She also really wants a new kitten which is problematic (our dog never really got along with our cats to begin with) so that adds another layer to the grief! Again we just answer her question and try to remember the good times with our cat. We look through pictures if she asks. She wants a photo book of the cat which I need to work on.
It is definitely hard dealing with your own grief on top of your child's. Dd did cry a lot, which was hard to see. She also likes to bring her up a lot, draw pictures, talk about her and that has been hard for dh and I at times, but if she needs to do that we let her.
Sorry for your loss.
http://forums.thenest.com/discussion/comment/120231929#Comment_120231929
There were some helpful replies. At the time I was kind of more concerned with my Dh than dd but good advice in there