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All pets go to "They laughed," she says. "But later, the same people were sitting in here crying. You don't know how you're going to feel until it happens to you."
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July 9, 1999 |
Kathleen and Raymond grew up in this neighborhood and for 21 years they've operated a funeral home for humans, but still their neighbors laughed or came inside just to gawk when they opened the new establishment. People with pets, even. One can imagine Kathleen sitting patiently through it all, like a mother waiting for her hyperactive kids to wind themselves down. She's been working in the death industry for two decades now. Her feelings aren't so easily bruised. "They laughed," she says mildly. "But then, later, I had these same people sitting in here crying. You don't know how you're going to feel until it happens to you." All Pets Go to Heaven has been in operation for two years now and it seems very much part of the neighborhood. The Leones describe it as an "all service" pet funeral home, providing burials and cremations, both private and communal, wakes in the Victorian viewing room, online counseling for the grief-stricken, memorial cards and plaques, embalming and even freeze-dried taxidermy. It's housed in a large, handsome brownstone on a street of brownstones. Raymond's parents own the building and his brother lives upstairs. Brown awnings shade the windows and are stamped with the silhouettes of rabbits and frogs. Even though every year more and more hip young Manhattanites are moving into Carroll Gardens, it still feels like a working-class Italian neighborhood. There are religious shrines in some of the front yards and small markets run by fathers and their sons. And there's the pet funeral home. As soon as I stepped into the viewing parlor and saw the small, powder-blue coffin
for the small male dog or cat, I knew I was among people who weren't afraid of family feeling. "I just had a wake for a Rottweiler, day before yesterday," Kathleen tells me. "He's being buried this morning. His owner's a single woman. She's burying him with a blanket she crocheted when she was a girl that was supposed to be for her first child. But she never married, never had any children. The dog was her son." Kathleen's the mother of three girls and very pregnant with the fourth. She has short blond hair, a strong face and brown eyes that look tired this particular morning, only a couple of weeks away from her due date. She's a registered nurse, and before she and Raymond opened up All Pets, Kathleen was a nursing supervisor in a long-term care facility for the elderly. Her daughters are named after her and Raymond's mothers and grandmothers. She describes herself as "old-fashioned" and says that their clients are just "regular Joes that come in off the street." We talk at Kathleen's desk, in the middle room of the funeral home. In the front is the viewing parlor, where rows of chairs face the little blue coffin and a statue of St. Francis of Assisi. In the room behind us, there's a wide selection of urns displayed on shelves. Some are shaped like dogs; some look like pretty cookie tins and are stamped with kittens' faces or flowers. The engravable urns are the most popular, according to Kathleen. They come in dark and light woods, white or gray granite and white marble, and are engraved with the deceased pet's name. The dates of birth and death and a photograph are applied to the front -- the smaller ones cost $125. "In the past there were no options for people [whose pets have died]," Kathleen says. "Just our being here raises a question in people's minds -- oh, what am I going to do when my pet dies?" The options she and her husband provide raise more questions: Burial or cremation? Would I visit a grave? Do I need them nearer to me? On the mantelpiece? If I give a wake, who would come? And should I have a religious service or just read a poem?
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