How to Respectfully Bury your Dead Pet – My Mouse Burial Story

How to Bury Your Dead Cat or Dog?

Have you just lost one of your dearest little furry friends? Did one of your beloved pets die?

Was it your life long beloved dog or cat?
Do you still remember him/her just like as if he/she were still there right besides you, rubbing against you, purring or barking?

Are you feeling alone, sad, misreable; as though there  is no one else out there who can understand you or comfort you?

But please don’t feel alone.

I understand your sadness, your devestation, your misery…. I too have had my share of loss.
When I was young, the only pets I had where two little mice in a cage by the window.

Mouse or not mouse, I still loved them dearly and used to play with them, pet them and watch them run around in their cage by the window.

They were not the plain sort of mice, but sandy colored dessert mice which where always active and friendly. These kind of mice, can loose their tails if they get scared, but this we had no idea about till one day mom tried to catch one of the sisters (now called Short tail) and grabbed her by the tail.

You can guess what happened: Mom was left shocked with a bloody stub of a tail.

A terrible incident to have happened.

Still, the mice lived on happily for a few more good years, but then some time after my 10 birthday, short tail got some brain infection and got very ill, she actually turned crazy.

Her ears started bleeding and white puss was coming out of them. She scratched at them and ran around in circles.

We had no idea what to do about her! So we just left her be. Hoping that she would recover somehow or another…. But she didn’t.

And then one day, she became murderous and killed her sister.  Just bit her neck out of the blue and killed her.

We came back and found a dead body of one of our mice.  Devestated, we set about preparing her funeral ceremony.

It was evening and we couldn’t go to bury her that day. So mom put her in the freezer so she wouldn’t go bad till the next morning.

You can bet your life that I didn’t open that freezer door that night or the next morning or for a long time after that!!!

The next morning I had to go to school so I couldn’t come along with mom to bury Longtail. I wrote her a long and beautifully written Good-Bye letter in golden ink which mom and I cried over while I was writing it. She then took it and the mouse from the fridge and went to bury her out in the forest by a path we always passed.

This is how the first mouse went, and the second one was soon to come.

A year later, the suffering, pained Shortail finally passed away to the Land of rest and Freedom which she had always dreamed of in her past life.

Ever since we had first bought her from a pet shop in Munich, both Shortail and Longtail had never stopped digging in hope of freedom.

And now, finally, they both had it.

We burried her respectfully in the nature; a place she had always dreamed to escape to.

Her too I wrote a long letter, telling her about all the times she was a good mouse, about how she had been such a young and youthful once and kind to her sister, to me to us. How she had been deserving and sweet and how I felt so sorry for her in the last pained, sad years of her life. I wished her all the best and that maybe now, she could finally be at rest.

“Live well, We love you Shortail, whereever you are now, be at rest, be at rest. Be happy and at peace!”

Even years after this, I still feel the tears coming to my eyes whenever I call up those memories from my hidden chambers of grief.

Mom dug a hole for Shortail with a big kitchen spoon and we buried her next to her sister.

I read the letter out loud to the wind and the skies and most importantly to Shortail.

I wrote it so touchingly, that when I read it out over the grave;  both mom and me, standing in the saturated wet grass on the hill,  drenched ourselves in our own salty rivers of tears.

Then it rained, adding to the streames of liquid cascading down our cheeks.

We placed little stones and rocks on top of the grave to mark where it was and stuck the paper between the stones to melt into the ground with her.

And that was the end of my two first pets; Shortail and Longtail.

Camille