Pet Prayer Flags and Sympathy Cards to Honor the Passing of a Beloved Pet
Alex
Special, magical, wonderful things often pop into our lives unexpectedly. So does grief, pain and sadness. It's one of the rules of living and there's no way around it. Our friend Alex gave us both joy and sadness in large measure. We found him at an animal shelter in North Salt Lake, UT. Walking the rows of chain link kennels with concrete floors we saw many, many dogs. Some cowered in fear at the back of their cell, some were totally indifferent to our presence, others wagged and whined, craving any kind of attention. And then there was this one little guy. . . He was five or six months old with a bottle brush nose, hair sticking straight out in front of his eyes. Liver and white, his fir was wiry yet soft. He sat at the kennel door, ears cocked, looking right at us with shiny bright eyes and a look that said he knew he was going home with us so let's get moving.
Alex blossomed into a family member immediately. He was a friend, a road trip companion, a nuzzler, a comic, a bagel filch, a hiking buddy. He was family no less than a son or daughter. He was included in all of our plans. He walked with us in the red sandstone desert of southern Utah. He swam with us in mountain lakes in Montana. He kept us company on road trips through Wyoming and Nevada. He carried a backpack into the High Uintas of Utah and strutted his stuff at Humane Society fundraisers in our home town. It was such a complete weaving together of lives, like a fabric. It warmed us and gave us a sense of balance and purpose. Alex was joy itself. To him, all life was a game and there was no end of ways to play it. We learned so much from him about how to look at our lives and how taking it too seriously is a waste of time. We could be stressed and distracted at times but Alex always brought us back to a balance just by tossing a ball into the air or getting totally fixated on a squirrel on a tree limb. It was all the simple things that made his world right.
Ten years into the mesh of our lives, Alex left us suddenly. Cancer the vet said. He was gone before we could prepare ourselves and he left a deep, dark hole with his passing. In the days and weeks that followed his death we learned the language of grief. We struggled with the understanding of something that cannot be understood, we struggle with it still, many years after his passing. Our Pet Prayer Flags came out of this struggle to accept and understand. We wanted something dynamic, not static like a card of condolence or fleeting as a bouquet of flowers. We wanted something that would continue to connect us to him, speak to him, wherever he is. We loved the simplicity and connection that Tibetans believed their prayer flags offered and so we designed our Pet Prayer Flags in the hope that our thoughts still reach Alex and that perhaps others will benefit from that same sense of infinite connection.
Prayers On The Wind - 313 Haugen Heights Rd., Whitefish, MT 59937 - Email