Tag Archives: death

5 Unique Ways to Honor Your Loved One’s Ashes

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https://www.pexels.com/photo/yellow-sunflowers-in-clear-glass-vase-1427855

https://www.pexels.com/photo/yellow-sunflowers-in-clear-glass-vase-1427855

Honoring the life of your loved one is so important when they have passed on. And when your loved one has opted for cremation, there is the question of what to do with their ashes. There are many ways to honor a loved one’s ashes that speak to the beautiful legacy they’ve left behind.

Incorporating their ashes into jewelry or works of art creates a piece that can forever hold their spirit. Spreading their ashes somewhere meaningful can be a fulfilling journey. Planting a memorial garden can help their legacy to grow on. And a custom urn is a way to memorialize them in a way as unique as they are. 

Here are five unique ways to honor your loved one’s ashes and their legacy.

  1. Cremation Jewelry 

Jewelry that incorporates a loved one’s ashes honors them and allows multiple individuals to have something to hold onto. Incorporating a loved one’s ashes into a cherished piece of jewelry can allow them to be with you always—when you travel to places they loved or wanted to see, at special events, and just with you for the little moments of everyday life.

Ashes can be incorporated into jewels, pendants, or other elements of your jewelry. Work with your individual jeweler to come up with the perfect tribute. 

  1. Custom Urns 
https://foreverence.com/cdn/shop/files/8-005.jpg?v=1689797192&width=750

Your loved one was like no one else, so why should you be limited by just a few urn options? Custom urns memorialize your loved one in a way that celebrates their life. An urn can be customized into the shape of your loved one’s favorite stadium, hobby, musical instrument, car, or anything you can think of. A customized urn can represent so much more for your loved one. 

With a custom urn, you are showcasing the things that made their life full and unique. Our lives are made up of all the little things that make us who we are. This option celebrates those little special details! You can think of it as a celebration of their life, rather than a representation of their passing. 

  1. Spread Them Somewhere Meaningful 
https://www.pexels.com/photo/unrecognizable-traveler-standing-on-hill-on-daytime-695220

Maybe your loved one moved here from somewhere far away to give your family a new life, and they never got to return to their birthplace. With cremation, you can bring them home. Spreading your loved one’s ashes in a place that was important to them can be a significant experience for your own life. 

Taking a pilgrimage to a place that was important for this special person in your life can be its own important journey. Perhaps you didn’t know this person when they lived in this place, and this can be a way to connect with them on a deeper level and better understand their legacy. 

  1. Planting Ashes 

How better to celebrate life than by growing life out of it? Did your deceased loved one have an excellent green thumb? Even if you’re a complete beginner, planting some flowers with your loved one’s ashes can be a memorable way to commemorate them. Maintaining a garden can be a wonderful activity for the whole family, and these flowers can grow for years to come so that other family members may be able to celebrate their legacy even if they did not know them. 

Every year when the flowers spring up again you can remember all of the wonderful memories you have and build new ones by getting into the dirt and helping that love continue to grow. 

  1. Make Art

Perhaps you’re an artist, or you know one whose work you love. You can incorporate your loved one’s ashes into paint for a painting. A beautiful painting can be emblematic of their life and the relationship they had with you. A painting is something that can be seen every day, admired, and not necessarily feel like a representation of passing. Incorporating ashes into a piece of art creates a memorial to be cherished and is another way to ensure that multiple family members can have a piece of this special memorial. 

Grief and mourning are a lifelong journey. When people have changed our lives in a big way, their impact is never gone. These unique ways of building out a memorial for your loved one can help incorporate the memory of them into your everyday life. These ideas can also help families have multiple tokens that remind them of their loved ones. 

Honoring the life of a loved one is an important, emotional, and multi-faceted journey that will look different for each member of your family. Coming together to collaborate on a way to celebrate a legacy can be a healing and beautiful journey for all. Your loved one was like no one else; honor their memory as such. 

Some Thoughts On Mourning

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Mourning

Past and Future Lessons

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past future learn lesson apply learned graphic country and victorian times

I love the thought of past and future when you talk about lessons because that’s what I believe life is about – Lessons. We learn lessons everyday, some hard and some so small we barely notice. We make decisions and then the outcomes reflect a positive or negative experience. Our brains seem to be hard wired to remember those end results and we should make better decisions in future situations. It is for those destined to repeat those lessons that did not learn from them the first times.

I have always believed that life is like this very long road. This road has many forks in it that represent decisions we must make. One of the roads from this fork is a straight shot with no ups and dons and no obstacles. The other fork leads to mountains and hills, streams and rivers that we must cross. Either path comes to the same main road that we call life.

Destinies happen on the main road like marriage, birth of a child and sadly death but it is up to us to make the right decisions and learn from the outcomes both good and bad. If we do not learn from them then we are destined to repeat the vicious cycle until we learn from them.

Victorian Caged Grave

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Although this is a bit different from what I usually post, I came upon this picture on the internet and just had to share. I have read and watched a lot on the subject of the undead and vampires, and even read about this cage over graves before. However, I have never actually seen a picture of one before and found it unique. So, I know what your asking, “so what does this have to do with this site and why is it posted?” Well, it has to do with the Victorian era and all of their superstitions and what we now know of as irrational fears.

The caged grave as seen above was used to prevent one of two things. 1: If you were to come back alive and become a walking undead then you wouldn’t be able to remove yourself from this cage and you could be dealt with. 2: If you were a vampire the same situation would apply to you.

I find death during the Victorian era to be fascinating, they seemed to have a love affair with death at least from an onlooker some 100 years in the future. Did you know that many peoples only photograph was taken AFTER they died. Yes, if you came from a poor family and you died, your family could scrape enough money together to have a memorial photo of you by yourself or your body could be “staged” to be in a family photo. This included babies and older folks and these photos were kept in a memorial album.

A memorial album was basically a scrapbook of photos of the deceased. You see, you would have photos of your loved ones, but you would also have memorial cards sent to you with the photos of the deceased person on the front announcing their death. Since everything delivered was delivered very slowly back then from one area of the country to another it might be weeks before you found out someone related to you died. This would announce their death but would give you a keepsake of their death and it would be added to your memorial photo album.

Many of these photos are sought after by collectors and can go for large sums of money. Especially sought after are entire albums, photos that are metal and those of young children and babies.

A good source of these pictures may be found at http://memorialphotosofthedead.wordpress.com/ and if you venture there please be advised as to what you will see. There are photos from the Victorian era as well as posed photos of gunned down armed robbers and pictures of famous people who have died since the Victorian era.

The Victorian era is filled with mysterious ideals and love for long forgotten traditions, still some we are using today.

The Death Of A Pet By Fleas

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Just recovering from the loss of a six week old Sarah… she was a brown, black and white “cow” Pekeignese. She was always on the small side and also on the non-active side so some of the first warnings went unnoticed.

Falcore - Foxie - Sarah - Chompers (Only one to make it through this nightmare was Falcore)

She first showed signs two days ago getting slower and slower and sleeping for longer periods of time. She stopped eating all together last night even with the temptation of something she absolutely loved.

I took her to the vet this morning and got the bad news. Sarah was bloodless…. the flea attacks in our home, that we had been doing everything we could to get rid of them, had literally sucked all the blood out of her tiny little body. The vet showed me her gums and her tummy and they were both very white along with the inside of her eyes.

The news was heartbreaking as the main treatment was to be a blood transfusion which could topple off at $500.00 plus which was clearly beyond my income level. So the next course of treatment was automatic deworming for worms (to see if this would help also) and a strong dose of vitamin drops. The idea was to help Sarah build her white blood cell count up… which would also help in her breathing better since she was starting to struggle with now by building her white blood cells up giving her more oxygen………. In addition to that getting rid of fleas.

Now I will tell you my wife and I have been vigilantes in getting rid of fleas. The house is cleaned and vacuumed, “dog safe” poison is placed all over our yard and especially around the perimeter of our house, we spray flea sprays in the house as well as use flea powders that you sprinkle everywhere and then vacuum up. We make mixtures of lemon juice and lemon extract sprays that get sprayed on the dogs and we bathe them in dawn lemon and flea citrus shampoos. Other then helping with Sarahs’ environment, there was nothing more we could do for Sarah since she was so small (weighing in at 1 lb) and was under three months.

I brought Sarah home after the vet gave her her worming medicine and I gave her her dosage of vitamins (1/2 vial every 12 hrs). She got worse and worse and eventually she left us and this world today just six hours after I took her to the vet.

My family and I are very hurt and saddened but I wanted to share my story in case someone else is having this problem and maybe I could prevent your baby from leaving you too early.