After a loved one leaves us it’s often too overwhelming a task to consider how we might commemorate them for the long and scary road ahead. After loosing Pierre, I knew he would always be in our heart but I also wanted him represented in our new home. It still aches to think about the memories we planned to make, like having our little Piggy get to fun around the house we built for him, just as much as we did for us.

When we have happy times, we tend to remember them in pictures and because so much of our time with Piggy should be celebrated, it only felt right to memorialize him this way. So I created a photo album with all my favorite photos of Pierre and gave them to Arthur on his birthday. I made sure the book was the right size to remain at the very top of the stack, just as Piggy himself would have preferred.

In hindsight, this wasn’t a great birthday gift, at all. But it was a great thing to do in general, to have a small but significant reminder always around of the love we shared with this little pig.

And in that same vain, I added some other remnants of celebratory moments from the past to our little table, like a few of the many champagne bottle corks my husband and I have collected over our years together, each bearing some kind of marker of what was. A relatively small but again meaningful way to remember some of our really great days, many of which included the little piggy who could charm the crumbs off a strangers finger or knock over the drink of someone completely beguiled by his winning looks and personality.

I wish I could say the lovely peonies and champagne corks would stay, but unfortunately one of our new pups has mastered the fine art of climbing up our coffee table and making beautiful things into potentially harmful toys. Let’s just say, hydrangeas will never be invited back into our home at this point!