Writing a Tribute to Your Pet: A Songwriter's Approach

Nashville is full of people who make a living turning a feeling into a few honest lines. That craft turns out to be useful for something nobody advertises it for: writing down who your animal actually was, while you still remember the details.

You do not have to be a writer. Nobody else has to read it. But of all the things people do after a pet dies — the urn, the paw print, the photo on the shelf — writing is the one that consistently comes back as the thing they are most glad they did. Memory softens fast. Two years on, you will remember that you loved them. You will have lost the particular way they came down the stairs.

The first rule: specific beats beautiful

Every songwriter in this town has been told to cut the word beautiful and write what they actually saw. It applies here exactly.

"She was the sweetest dog and we loved her so much" is true, and it could be about any dog that has ever lived. Compare:

• "She would not step on a storm drain. Not once in eleven years. She'd go around, every time, like it was a personal policy."
• "He sat on the left side of the couch. If you sat there first, he'd sit on your feet until you moved."
• "She hated the sound of the ice maker and loved the sound of the mail truck."

Those are the lines that will make you cry in ten years, because they are the ones only you know.

Prompts to get you started

If you are sitting with a blank page, answer these plainly. One or two sentences each, no editing:

• What noise did they make that you could pick out of a crowd?
• What did they do that annoyed you? (Include this. It is part of them.)
• Where did they sleep, exactly?
• What were they like as a young animal, and how did that change?
• What did they do when you came home?
• What was the last normal day like — not the last day, the last normal one?
• What did they teach you that you did not want to learn?

Structure, if you want one

A tribute does not need an arc, but many people find it easier with a shape borrowed from song: a verse for how they arrived, a verse for the middle years, a bridge for the ending, and a short chorus line you repeat — something they did, or something you always said to them. That repeated line is usually where the whole thing lands.

Keep it short. Two hundred words that are true will outlast two thousand that are trying.

What to do with it afterward

• Read it out loud once, alone, to hear where it is false. The false parts are usually the grand ones.
• Print it. Files get lost across phones and laptops. Paper in a drawer survives.
• Put a copy with the urn or the collar, if you keep them.
• Send it to the people who knew them — the vet tech who always got excited to see them, the neighbor who fed them when you traveled, the friend who dog-sat. Those people were part of your animal's life and they usually never get told what happened.
• If you write music, write the song. You do not have to release it. Several of the most-loved songs about grief in this town started as something the writer never planned to play for anyone.

For children in the house

Kids often do this more naturally than adults. Give a child paper and ask them to write or draw "one thing about her" and you will frequently get the single most accurate line in the house. Keep those pages. They become, in time, a record of that child as much as of the animal.

If you cannot write yet

Then do not. Some people need a year before words are possible, and forcing it early can feel like being made to perform a feeling you are still inside of. In the meantime, use your phone: record a two-minute voice memo saying whatever comes. It counts. It is often better than what you would have written, because the voice carries what the sentence cannot.

The point is not to produce something good. The point is that in a decade, when the details have gone soft, you will have a page in your handwriting that says exactly who they were — and that page will still sound like them.

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