I love when the private home of a very rich person finally passes out of the cycle of inheritance and the place gets turned into a museum that’s open to the public. I go with the brawling masses to see the unabashed plunder-horde of the super-rich, and it’s always worth it. Most recently, I did this at the Hilldale Estate in our nation’s benighted capitol. The robber barons who owned it filled it with Russian Imperial treasures and furniture sturdy enough to stage crucifixions on, but I went for the Dior show they were putting on: clothes that had been designed for and worn by Grace Kelly, and the silhouette that came to define mid-century elegance for women. However, the biggest surprise of the day was the long-dead mistress of the house’s dog cemetery.
Like a lot of rich people Marjorie Post had an enduring interest in and ability to bond only with pure-bred and fussy dogs, so a dozen of them are buried on the grounds of her estate. It’s beautiful tribute to the friends who define much of one’s life. Unlike human remains, animal remains can legally be buried on one’s private property. The experience made me wonder how many pet cemeteries there are (aside from the one imagined by Stephen King when he was deep in his appropriation period.)
There are well-known examples from antiquity of mankind burying pets with great reverence and love, and dogs have been buried with kind words and deep care for almost as long as they’ve been domesticated. The Romans in particular were known for their touching dog epitaphs: “If you happen to see this monument, laugh not, I pray, though it is a dog’s grave.” The Cimetière des Chiens et Autres Animaux Domestiques in a suburb of Paris is one of the oldest in Europe, being a fancy pet cemetery since the 19th century and featuring sculpture and monuments dedicated to and depicting pets.
Nor is this custom limited to the west. Hiran Minar in Pakistan was built by a Mughal emperor in the 17th century as a game reserve for his beloved antelope, but became a resting place to many more. Ashkelon National Park, just north of the Gaza strip, is the oldest known dog cemetery in the world. Beginning in the 5th century BCE, people of various Semitic religions like the Canaanites, Phoenicians, Babylonians, and Assyrians may have had religious relationships with their dogs resulting in this space where thousands of dogs (mostly puppies) were interred, but much of that period is lost to history and countless centuries of intervening bloodshed in fighting over that region.
But what of modern man’s best friend? If one is not as rich as a robber baron, is there hope for a dignified end for one’s faithful tabby cat without a private estate? As a matter of fact, some cemeteries allow for pets to be buried in the same place as their humans, including Aspin Hill Memorial Park in Montgomery County, Maryland. As a result of a 2011, New York State also allows for family burial: people where pets are, pets where people are. The famous Hartsdale Pet Cemetery, a woman asked to be laid to rest where her pets were, and the rest is legislative and funerary history.
As more and more people opt for a life without children, as home ownership becomes increasingly impossible, as many households come to regard pets as sacred, beloved personages who deserve all the honors of death, the idea of a pet cemetery only becomes more important. If the internet has taught us anything over the last twenty years it’s that we cannot let go of cats, even cats we’ve never met. We’d die for them, so digging a hole in the backyard isn’t going to cut it for most. For a landless generation, pet cremation can be an excellent choice and offer mementos if you lack the space for a proper monument like the one I saw at Hilldale.
Every time I bury a pet or help a friend bury theirs, my memory always returns to the first of these rituals that I can remember. My little brother and I got a pair of hamsters: one brown and one red. We named them Ricky and Lucy and kept them in a cage full of wood shavings in our shared bedroom. Ricky died within a year. Lucy, somehow, lived to be seven years old. No one understood how. My brother fed her fried chicken, and more than ones I saw her eat a live cricket. She bit savagely and ran like a champion on her little wheel. By her seventh year, I began to think she might live forever.
When we woke one day to find her cold and still, we devised the kind of burial that only very weird kids can come up with. One day I like to imagine that an archaeologist digging in what used to be a suburb will find the delicate little bones of a rodent who was wrapped in toilet paper like a mummy, put in a shoe as a sarcophagus, and surrounded with dried corn, sugar cubes, wild flowers, and a letter from a child who loved her very much buried beneath the metal skeleton of her exercise wheel. Perhaps that they will conclude that children formed meaningful attachments to cats and dogs and fish and snakes and guinea pigs and rabbits from the little holes we all learned to dig when we were just learning that death comes for us all. Even dogs.
Maybe they will look thousands of years of human history over and see that we have always loved our pets enough to lay them gently to rest.
