Custom Pet Urns .Com Blog

Our pets. Amazing. Beautiful. Generous. Loving.

And so I created light. Curves. Candles. Grandeur. For them. For their love.

This urn is an expression of art allowed to expand. I created this with no limits in mind. It is huge. About 6-7 feet across and as tall as I am. Candles galore. Nothing held back…

Candelabra Pet Urn

Candelabra Pet Urn

Three great losses. Each one, in life and in death, so very different.

I want to speak to the different kinds of death they represent and how our feelings tend to reflect those differences.

Ed McMahon.

He had a great, wonderful life. He lived a whole 86 years. We feel the loss, but it is o.k., as we knew it was a life well lived, long lived, and we knew he was reaching the end of his life, as to be expected. And so we mourn him, but not with such a sadness that is filled with grief, but a sadness of losing an old acquaintance.

Farrah Faucet.

She had a shorter life. In our terms, too short and that brings grief. She had cancer, we knew it, so, while her death was shocking, again, being so young, we has some part of our brain ready for it, as we knew she had a difficult disease with the possibility of death coming from that. Therefore our sense of loss is stronger, as now it is more than the sadness of losing an old acquaintance, but something that was tragic as well.

Michael Jackson.

Unexpected. So young. So out of the blue. Our grief is more intense as we were not prepared, he did not live a ‘full term’ of life. So we have the loss of an acquaintance, the shock of the unexpected, and, the feeling of half his life being unlived. Michael’s death combines those three elements of loss and death, and that is why we are reacting the strongest to his death. (Added to that, many of us have our own personal memories that have been defined, even created by his music.) We have the sadness of losing an old acquaintance, the tragedy of dying young, and the shock of having it just come at us out of the blue.

I have heard a lot of talk comparing their deaths and our feelings, and just wanted to help explain our reactions to them.

I am sorry for all their losses. They all gave gifts to this world that are greatly appreciated. And they will be wonderfully remembered.

Bless you all,
Alexandra
Custom Pet Urns

p.s. I wanted to also remember the late and great Koko Taylor, who recently passed. I feel fortunate for getting to see her live a few years back. Truly an icon.

I had the wonderful honor of being asked to create a special line of pet urns for We Are The Cure. I have written about them before, as I am also a guest blogger there. They are fully committed to finding a cure for cancer in dogs.

It seems to be so very pervasive. I get calls for orders all the time because people have lost a pet to cancer. These wonderful and amazing people are doing the work that needs to be done!

You can visit them at We Are The Cure, you can see my special line of urns at this link: pet urns, and you can read some of my blog posts at theNational Canine Cancer Foundation Blog

Thank you. And, again, they really are deserving of your support. Can you imagine the wonderful, amazing, glorious day when cancer is just a thing of the past?

Take care,
Alexandra
Custom Pet Urns

The loss of a loved pet hurts so much because we are so passionate about them. They love us so freely, so totally, that we cannot help but love them back with that same freedom. And that is what makes us vulnerable.

We may have human relationships where we have learned to put up protective defenses, but we have no need to put up defenses against the pets that love us. We are open. Both to the love and to the pain. We have no wall, we have no past history, we have nothing that stands in the way of our love.

That is a good, wonderful, amazing thing. So our hurt, however painful it may be, is also a reaffirmation of our love. That we are able to give it so freely, so openly, so totally.

So in your pain, see it for what it really, truly, is: love.

Allow it to go free. Time will take it and send it on just like a balloon that has been released by a child into the sky…

Cherubina:

-my only photo, but that doesn't diminish the love! (she was a feral)

Be well,
Alexandra
Custom Pet Urns

Hello,

I am back up with my blog. Thank you for your patience. The wonderful and amazing people at machighway.com really helped me. If you have a mac and are looking for a host, I recommend them 100%!

Take good care,
Alexandra

I don’t talk about my work too much here. But today I felt I should share. I am very fortunate in that I get to create art and have my own business. And I still get to work with animals. But not in the way we usually imagine. We all have the same parts in life. To be born, to grow, to be fully grown, and then to pass on.

I fell into working with the last part. It is the part that frightened me always. But now it has become a place of nurturing. A peaceful place where I can help with moving on to the last phase. Customers have told me that it gives them comfort. But it gives me comfort as well. I have a special place of caring for these pets. No, I have never met them, but I feel the honor to care for them. I feel I have purpose. I feel I have a roll in the life process. It places a pretty heavy demand on me, or at least I place it on myself, to create perfectly every time. But somehow, it always works out to be right. I think that comes from the sense of purpose I get.

And I get to support other wonderful artists, who do wonderful, amazing work. And they get to create, and earn from their art. That I can facilitate that is one of the greatest parts of having Custom Pet Urns. I really, really love giving them checks. It feels really good.

To create for others is a blessing.

To be able to help them through their loss and grief is an honor.

Thank you, I am moved daily,
Alexandra

I fear.

Death.

Loss.

Being alone.

Losing a love.

But what I fear is false.

We are not alone.

Our love lives on.

Death is not what we think it is.

Moments in time is what we have.

And these moments are precious.

They are the key to eternity.

They are the window to eternity.

We can hold them precious.

We can believe in them.

We can be together always.

Because we already are.

Pet Urns

My Twitter account has a bit of a different focus, but I hope it is something that can be of value to you.

I use Twitter to help remind people of what is precious in the moment. Not to take anything for granted, especially our pets. I am looking to grow it into a kind of daily meditation on being present to our lives and those that are around us.

We need to learn how to really live when we have the opportunity. It is so easy for us to get distracted, busy, worried, stressed. But then we miss out on what is of true value in our lives.

I hope my posts will help be a daily reminder to you.

You can click on the link on the right hand side of the page or simply right here.

Thank you and take good care,
Alexandra
Custom Pet Urns

There are so many good resources that speak to the loss of your pet. The grieving process is similar to the loss of a family member or good (human) friend.

I think the one distinction that stands out is society’s expectations of how you should feel. Society sometimes tells us that we should not be as sad as we feel, as a pet is ‘less valued’ than a person.

Emotion is emotion. Grief is grief. We receive unconditional love every single day from a pet that is in our lives. That can create a huge emptiness when they pass. And that should never, ever be discounted.

Here are a few links for reading about the phases of grief and how to handle it with yourself, and your family.

• Five stages of mourning and how to explain the death of a pet to your children (broken down by age group, which is wonderful): HomeVet.com: Pet Loss
• The Humane Society of the United States addresses grief and also how it affects seniors: Humane Society: Death of Your Pet
• Moria Allen always has wonderful information:
  Pet-Loss.net” Ten Tips on Coping with Pet Loss
• More great information. Especially what ‘not’ to say to a child: PetLoss.com: Grief and Pet Loss

I hope you can find some good information here,
Alexandra
Custom Pet Urns

The more we give, the more we get. The more we get, the more we give.

We are all so connected. We do not realize how much our actions create movements elsewhere in the world.

A request to create a unique urn for Polly gave my heart this amazingly wonderful thank you:

We received Polly’s urn today and I cried when I saw it…it was so perfect for her. It was more special than I ever imagined thanks to all the extra’s you did to personalize it. We really want to thank you for making this difficult process easier for us. You are such a wonderful, caring
person and I am so happy that we found your website. We looked at so many urns for Polly and all of them were so generic and cold. The urn you crafted for Polly was unique and special just as she was. When we look at it, we can actually see Polly squinting her eyes and coming towards us with kisses (her favorite thing to do.) And the pink you added to the bow and the base was perfect! Thank you for taking the time to do that as I know that had never been requested before.

Because I gave her:

this:

But what happens is so much more:

Polly’s mom had asked me to customize her urn with pink. A pink petal. A pink bow. Polly wore pink. I had not worked with pink yet, but serendipitously, I was designing some urns for the National Canine Cancer Foundation, and I was trying to figure out how to design with pink.

Polly’s urn allowed me to be creative, to play around with colors. Which in turn allowed me to discover a perfect pink for the NCCF Urns. Because of that, my urns can help raise money to find a cure for cancer in dogs. Which in turn will help other dogs and people. Which in turn makes the world a better place.

We are all here together in joy and suffering. How wonderful it is that we can all lift each other up when needed, and create something wonderful!

p.s. to see more of my wonderful artists, go to pet urns. Thank you!