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Mourning Your Pet: Owners Provide Japanese Buddhist Funeral For Their Cat [Photos]

By Jeremy Butler
Published on: 03:08 PST, Jun 2, 2014

For many animal owners, losing a pet is like losing a member of the family. Sometimes, the mourning of your pet can be similar to mourning the death a friend or loved one in that the realization that they’re really gone is hard to handle and the grieving process can be similar.

Well for Imgur user meowmeowstar, the mourning process for his family’s beloved cat involved a proper Japanese Buddhist Funeral, seemingly down to the last detail.

Detailing the entire ceremony with photographs, the process can be seen below along with the owners captions.

Be warned, there are images containing the cat before and after the cremation process so if this is too much for you, please move on.

Funeral home for pets.
Public funeral service parlor is held on the ground floor.
Ours was carried out privately inside this cremation room.
Altar in front of the cremation chamber.
After long chanting and prayers by the monk, we were asked to light the incense.
The monk placed our cat on the cremation bed and recited a lot more prayers.
During the cremation we waited in a room full of communal shrines for pets.
Part of the shrines.
When we returned to the cremation room, we had a choice of the case for the urn.
Our cat’s bones.
The monk picked out the main ones on the tray to show us.
Skull, toes, and tail bones.
We transferred the rest of the bones on the cremation bed into the urn using chopsticks.
While we were hard at work, the monk painstakingly rearranged the tail bones into a tail!
He picked up the really small bits of bone fragments left by us with great care.
Then he used a pair of thick chopsticks to squish the bones.
To make room for the skull and the rest of the bones carefully in their anatomically correct order.
When he finished, we were asked to put the tail bones in the urn by hand.
Then he swept the fine powdery bits into the urn with chopsticks and a brush.
He sealed the urn with tapes and tied the cover and placed it in a carry bag for us to take home.
The shrine for our cat at home.
We miss you.

[Images via Imgur user meowmeowstar]

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