My girl came home today.
I signed for a cardboard box that carried a label warning that it may contain cremated pet remains, which felt like an absurdly clinical way of saying:
Blitz is in here.
My son and I opened it together.
I have never seen or touched the cremated remains of any living being before, and I really didn’t know what I expected. For the first minute, it was just… strange. Not frightening. Not horrible. Just something my brain had absolutely no previous file folder for.
And because apparently I needed the full sensory experience, I smelled them.
Nothing.
I touched them.
They were incredibly fine, almost like baby powder, with tiny fragments of bone mixed throughout.
And suddenly, this thing I had spent more than a week trying very hard not to think about was sitting in front of me.
I had been dreading this part.
I had bad dreams about Blitz being cremated. That’s probably what I get for spending a lifetime filling my brain with Stephen King, but there are some places even my horror-loving imagination has no business going. Every time my mind tried to picture what was happening to her after she left our home, I tried desperately to redirect it.
I didn’t want to imagine my beautiful girl burning.
I was afraid that when her ashes came back, I would somehow see that instead of her.
I didn’t.
What I felt was relief.
She was home.
Of course, first I had to get her into the urn without committing some catastrophic Cami maneuver.
I cannot adequately describe the level of concentration involved in transferring those ashes. All I could picture was myself dropping the bag and Blitz going poof across the room while I stood there screaming, vacuum forever banished from that section of the house.
There are probably more graceful thoughts to have while handling the remains of your beloved service dog.
I did not have them.
But I didn’t drop her.
I carefully filled the urn I chose for her—the one that says:
“You were my favorite hello and my hardest goodbye.”
And God, was she ever.
There was enough to fill her urn and still plenty remaining. Some of those ashes will eventually become part of the memorial rose garden I am going to plant for her. She will quite literally become part of something beautiful that grows here.
And I’ve been thinking about keeping a tiny amount for something else.
I want a tattoo for Blitz.
I’ve heard of memorial tattoos incorporating a very small amount of cremation ash into the ink, and if I can find a reputable artist willing and able to do it safely, I think that may be what I ask for for Christmas this year. The idea of carrying some tiny physical piece of her with me for the rest of my life feels incredibly right.
Because she carried me for so much of hers.
Today I finished her shadow box.
Her urn is inside now, surrounded by pieces of the life she lived with us: her service dog patch, tags, photographs, paw print, fur and the little things that somehow became sacred simply because they belonged to her.
The fresh flowers sit above it. Candles burn beside it. Her memorial shelf has become this warm, glowing little corner of our home.
The shadow box may be complete.
Her memorial isn’t.
I don’t think it ever really will be.
There are still photographs coming. Her album is being made. There will be pictures on the wall. There will be a rose garden. There may be a tattoo. There will undoubtedly be more candles, more flowers, more little things I see somewhere and immediately think, That’s for Blitz.
And there will be stories.
So many stories.
For almost sixteen years, that dog left pieces of herself everywhere—in this house, in photographs, in my children’s childhoods, in the memories of people who loved her, and most of all in me.
Today something changed, though.
There was a terrible finality in touching those ashes. I can’t pretend there wasn’t. This was physical proof that the body I kissed goodbye, the head that rested in my lap for the last time, is gone.
But strangely, that finality brought peace with it.
Because for the first time since she left, I don’t have to wonder where she is.
She’s here.
Some of her will someday be beneath roses.
Maybe a tiny bit of her will travel through the rest of my life with me beneath my skin.
But tonight, she’s home in the little memorial corner we’ve built around a life that was far too enormous to ever actually fit inside a shadow box.
And somehow…
I feel better.
Not healed. Not finished grieving. Not magically okay.
Just better.
My girl came home today.
And I didn’t realize until I held her again—in this strange, heartbreaking new form—how badly I needed her to. ❤️
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