Honoring a Pet on Día de los Muertos

In many New Mexican households, the last days of October bring out the marigolds, the photographs and the candles. If your pet died this year, you may be wondering whether they belong on the ofrenda alongside your grandmother and your uncle.

For a great many families, the answer has always been yes. Animals have a long place in these remembrances, and in much of Mexico and the Southwest it is unremarkable to see a photograph of a dog beside the photographs of relatives, with a bowl set out and a favorite toy resting against the frame.

If this is your family's tradition, here is how pets are commonly included. If it is not your tradition, the same ideas work perfectly well as a private fall remembrance — you do not need permission to set out a candle and a photograph.

What families put out for an animal

• A photograph, ideally one where they look like themselves rather than one taken at the very end.
• Water. Traditionally set out for the journey, and for a pet it doubles as the most familiar object in their life — many families use the actual bowl.
• Food they loved. The specific treat. The one they were not supposed to have.
• Marigolds (cempasúchil), whose scent and color are said to guide the dead home. Petals are sometimes laid in a path toward the altar.
• A candle, often one per soul remembered.
• Something that was theirs — collar, tag, a worn-out tennis ball, a tuft of fur kept after grooming.
• Papel picado above, and for households that keep them, small clay or wooden animal figures.

Some families place pets on a lower tier of a multi-level ofrenda, some give animals their own small altar, and plenty put everyone together on one surface. There is no single correct arrangement, and households differ street to street in Albuquerque.

Including children

This is one of the gentlest ways to help a child grieve an animal, because it gives grief a job. Children can choose the photograph, cut the papel picado, arrange the petals, pick which treat goes in the bowl. The act of preparing a place for someone who died — rather than being told to stop being sad about it — tends to be far more useful than adults expect.

It also quietly teaches something true: that remembering is an ongoing practice, not a single event you get through.

If their ashes are home

Many families set the urn on or beside the ofrenda for those days and then return it to its usual place afterward. Others prefer not to move it at all and simply set the photograph out. If you have not yet decided what to do with the ashes, there is no deadline — plenty of people keep them for years before scattering, and plenty never scatter at all.

A first year is different

The first Día de los Muertos after a death is heavier than the ones that follow, for pets as much as for people. Some families find the preparation comforting; others find themselves undone by the sight of the bowl. Both happen. If this year you can only manage a candle and a photograph taped to the wall, that is a complete observance.

Other fall remembrances

Albuquerque families who do not keep an ofrenda often mark the season in other ways — a luminaria set out on a winter evening, a walk along the bosque where you used to go, a name added to a memorial wall at a shelter or clinic. What matters is not the form. It is having one time in the year when you deliberately say their name out loud instead of waiting for grief to ambush you on an ordinary Tuesday.

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