Disneyland For Grief

What do you do on a Sunday morning?
You get an invite to a local pet cemetery for breakfast of course !!
It was the most surreal of moments
The pet cemetery is a phenomenon I find a great deal of difficulty with
I've passed the place hundreds of times on the A55 and it looks very much like a regular cemetery save for a modern brick and glass building which houses a grand and very popular tea room which overlooks the greenlawns and gravestones.
I've always had a healthy disdain for the place
Disneyland for grief , I've always thought

But yesterday morning I found myself parking in it's neat car park with Mary in the passenger seat as moral support. We were 20 minutes early before I met the others for a cooked breakfast (!) so the both of us wandered about the graves of pets long gone.

It was a strangely emotional experience. Set in neat lawns with runner ducks wandering around like stupid wine bottles I read the emotional eulogies of "fluffy",  and of "Leo" and of "International velvet " the racehorse. So much more emotional than the aseptic gravestones of us humans , the gravestones shrieked of loss and love and pain.
A "best friend" lost, a "darling baby" gone, a "rock" mourned , we ambled past dozens of expensive headstones feeling overwhelmed by the loss shared in a safe public place......
I stopped at this grave and promptly burst into tears at it's simple statement of grief

I was glad that Mary and I were allowed into the cafe together. As my table mates and I ate our breakfast platters, the waitress brought Mary her own bowl of chopped Sausage

I hugged her all the way home