Keeping a Memory Book for a Pet Who Is Still Here

Do it now, not later

Every family who has built a memory album after a loss describes the same difficulty: the photographs are scattered across three phones, two dead laptops and a defunct social media account, and half of them are gone. Gathering them while your pet is alive is an ordinary pleasant afternoon rather than an archaeological dig through grief.

What to include

Photographs, obviously — but also the things that vanish. The nickname nobody outside the house knows. What they do when you get home. The food they steal. The noise they make. Write it badly rather than not at all; nobody is marking it.

Keep it somewhere that survives

Phones break, cloud accounts lapse, laptops die. Whatever you build, keep a copy somewhere else. Printed photographs are underrated for exactly this reason — a physical album cannot be lost to a forgotten password.

A place that does this for you