Bideawee Pet Cemetery: Ceramics

I've posted about ceramic headstone portraits before, but the I never shared all of the ones we saw at Bideawee Pet Memorial Park. We began noticing the ceramics almost immediately, and for a strange reason—a majority of them had been damaged to the point where you could no longer make out the animal, and it looked intentional. Thankfully, some portraits managed to escape this seemingly random desecration, because they're truly wonderful.

I gave a brief history of human porcelain cemetery portraiture in this post, but it just makes sense that their popularity would spread to pet cemeteries as well. In fact, pet portraits almost seem more normal—even pre-Instagram, I would imagine that pet photography was widespread. The one thing that has been very clear in every pet cemetery that I've visited is just how much animals mean to their owners. Anyone that loves their pet enough to memorialize it with a burial and tombstone would likely have no shortage of photos of their beloved companion.

Some of the portraits feature pets in costumes—like my favorite, the dapper dachshund whose tombstone read "In Loving Memory, Mr. Nathan D. Friedman, My Son," Duchess in what appears to be a hand-knitted sweater (with a hood!) or Penny in her stylish plaid coat.

The portraits aren't reserved exclusively for dogs and cats or single pets—we saw at least a few bird photos as well as group shots. But portraits that really got to me were the ones that included their owners, most of which were from a pre-cellphone camera era. Again, if you loved your pet enough to buy them a granite tombstone, then a Sears portrait studio session probably didn't seem too extravagant either.