What a lion, a rabbi, and a dog taught me about grief
In 1912, a Hungarian princess living at Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel threw a wake for her lion cub. The animal, named Goldfleck, had been part of the Ringling brothers circus. When he died unexpectedly, the princess didn’t know what to do with his body. So she buried him in Hartsdale, a leafy patch of land north of New York City that today is the oldest pet cemetery in the United States.
More than a century later, Goldfleck rests under a marble gravestone alongside 70,000 other animals: dogs, cats, ferrets, birds, turtles, guinea pigs. There are about 900 humans interred there, too, those who couldn’t imagine eternity without their pets. The grounds are dotted with angel statues and paws carved in stone. People bring flowers. They cry. They remember.
“Unlike some human cemeteries where there’s certain sections for different religions, we don’t have that,” said Ed Martin, whose family has run Hartsdale for half a century. “So you could have a Jewish dog next to a Catholic cat.”
Grief is supposed to follow a script. Someone dies, and Jewish tradition tells us what to wear, what to say, when to mourn, when to stop. But the script doesn’t cover what happens when what you’ve lost had four legs, a tail, and no words.
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I still mourn my pets, some gone for years, one, my pretty, pretty Princes, Marigny, who died January 6th. Their paw prints never leave our hearts!
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