Alfie’s ready to come home…

That was the call we’ve just had from the vets. A lovely and quite melancholy call to be honest, just as if he’s had a minor procedure and he has awoken and is now ready to come home.

Reality is a little more stark. We are now heading down to collect our little fellah after he has been cremated.

Our beautiful lad has come home

We didn’t know what to expect to be honest, do we take a bag? Is he in a polythene bag? My wife was upset as she’d taken the call as I had been on nights and was in bed. I had this overwhelming feeling yesterday that he’d be coming home today, so in a way when I awoke I wasn’t surprised, strange isn’t it?

We needn’t have fretted, it was all so professional. He’s in a lovely woodland scene tube, we didn’t want a sealed casket as we wanted his ashes to go with ours in the end, please don’t judge us, it’s what we want and you will never understand just what this little character meant to us.

We also have a certificate of individual cremation, with lovely words, we have a lovely little picture frame memento with his paw print, we now have to pick a picture from the thousands we have of him, no easy task and I suspect we will have words about this. The vets have taken a cutting of his fur and put it in a small phial, lovely touch. We have two beautiful cards with his paw print on, and I will be using one of these to get a permanent tattoo on my arm with his pet name as he was known to many in the family- “Alfie Moon”.

The feeling in the house at the moment is nice, all the doubt we had has now gone, and we are so happy with the professional service we have experienced.

We can now move on to the healing stage, as he is now home. It’s so weird that the immense feeling of grief has lifted and a modicum of calmness and happiness has returned, it needed to as it had been missing for some time now.

Our lad is home, where he deserves to be. And he will be with us forever more.

Welcome home son ❤️

A day of necessary chores

Anyone who’s picked up on these posts of mine of recent days will know that we lost a very important member of our family on Friday just gone. Our dog Alfie went to sleep after suffering a number of ailments over the past years, culminating in a steep decline in his quality of life in the last couple of months.

It’s a tough and harrowing decision to make, bringing an end to a life that has brought nothing but intense joy and happiness to yours for the last 11yrs and 3 months.

But we had to do it, he couldn’t suffer anymore.

The hole that opened up in our family that day was immense. We stopped eating, our diet has been tears and cuddles and just constantly comforting each other. Along with this now is a list of chores that have to be done, like it or not his stuff has to be sorted, what do we keep? What do we donate? What do we dispose of?

Me, I want to keep it all but I have to be realistic, we don’t want to delete him from our memories as that will never happen, we don’t want to remove his presence from our home as it was his as well as ours. However there are unfortunate animals out there that would greatly benefit from Alf’s legacy and that’s what today is about.

Firstly we return to the vets, we have cards and gifts for the staff there who have all been super towards our little lad, we’re not looking forward to this but it has to be done, we have to settle his account as we left there Friday broken and gibbering wrecks.

Secondly we head to the Local dogs trust homing centre where we can donate Towels, Bedding and an elderly dog stroller

Thirdly we will go to the local hospice shop where we can donate other items, that again will help this wonderful charity.

It’s going to be hard, the house is going to be a little emptier today. But his legacy will be that he is helping others both canine and human, and isn’t that a wonderful thing.

I’m sure I will write a lot more about him on here and I’m not apologetic for that at all. My wife and I are still very raw about his passing and we will breakdown at a moments notice, however we are supporting each other, and doing what we can to ease the pain, and not forget him. Walks and talks are now our priority, it helps.

It’s amazing how, you can fall so madly in love with an animal, another species. Life really is wonderful and heartbreaking in equal measures.

Peace to you all