How to Write a Pet Obituary (With a Real Example)
A pet obituary is a short piece of writing — usually two to five paragraphs — that tells who your animal was: their name, the years they were with you, a few specific things only you would know, and what their absence actually feels like. You don't need formal language or a template. You need one true detail, then another. Start with their name and age, add the moment you got them, name one habit that was entirely theirs, and close with who they leave behind. That's the whole structure. Everything else is just more of you, and more of them.
Why a Pet Obituary Matters
People sometimes feel embarrassed writing formally about a cat or a dog. They worry it will seem like too much. It isn't. If you spent twelve years stepping around a dog bed in the kitchen, if you changed your commute so a cat wouldn't be alone too long, if you talked to them out loud when no one else was in the house — that was a relationship. An obituary is just a record of it.
Writing one also does something useful for grief. It forces you to be specific. And specificity is the thing that actually helps, more than any phrase about "beloved companions" or "waiting at the rainbow bridge." The specifics are what you're actually missing.
What to Include
- Full name (and any nicknames). The name on the vet paperwork and the six other names you actually called them.
- Age and dates. When they came into your life and when they left it.
- How you found each other. The shelter, the cardboard box, the coworker who couldn't keep the litter.
- One or two habits that were entirely theirs. Not "she was playful." The specific thing she did with her paw when she wanted the faucet turned on.
- What your daily life looked like with them in it. The walk route. The spot on the couch. The sound they made at 5pm when they knew dinner was coming.
- Who survives them. Family members, human and animal.
- An honest line about the loss. Not a euphemism — what it actually is to come home to a house where they aren't.
A Real Example
Obituary for Biscuit, 2009–2023
Biscuit — formally "Biscuit Graham Kowalski," though he never answered to either name — died at home on a Tuesday afternoon in November, two weeks after his fourteenth birthday. He was a beagle mix who smelled permanently of warm bread and river water, even when he hadn't been near a river in months.
He came to us from a rescue in 2010, undersized for his age and deeply suspicious of ceiling fans. He got over the fans eventually. He never stopped being undersized. He spent most of his adult life convinced that the correct place to sleep was across my ankles, and that the correct time to bark was during phone calls. He was right about the ankle thing.
His daily rituals were non-negotiable: a lap around the backyard at 6:15am, a second lap that was really just the first one again, a long assessment of the kitchen floor after breakfast, and a late-afternoon position in the front window that he held like it was a job. On walks, he stopped at every driveway. We never got anywhere quickly. I didn't mind as much as I pretended to.
He is survived by my daughter Maya, who taught him to sit at age four and has never let any of us forget it, and by our cat Oleander, who tolerated him for fourteen years and is now, apparently, looking for him in all his usual spots.
The house is quiet in a way that isn't peaceful. We're getting used to it slowly.
Where to Keep It
Once you've written it, an obituary deserves somewhere better than a notes app or a Facebook post that scrolls away in two days. Scan2Remember's free digital memorial page at app.scan2remember.com lets you build a lasting page for your pet — the obituary, photos, videos, even a guestbook where other people who loved them can leave their own specific memories. It's free to create, and it stays. If you later want a physical plaque with a QR code to mount at their grave or a memorial spot in your garden, that's available too — but the digital page stands entirely on its own.
One Last Thing
You don't have to publish it anywhere. You don't have to share it. Some people write a pet obituary just to have written it — to sit with all those details before they start to blur. That's enough of a reason. They were specific. The grief is specific. The writing can be too.