If you’ve loved more than one pet, you already know this quiet truth: grief doesn’t replace itself. It layers. A dog who grew up with your kids. A cat who sat beside you through a breakup. The rabbit who made your apartment feel like home. Years pass, and the memories don’t disappear—they gather in the same places you live and breathe: the back step, the garden path, the corner of the couch where everyone somehow fit.
That’s why many families eventually start thinking about a shared memorial. Not because they want to “combine” love, but because they want a place that can hold a long story. A space that says: all of you mattered here.
A shared pet memorial can be as simple as a shelf with framed photos and a few pet urns for ashes, or as involved as a dedicated corner of the yard with a marker, stones, and a plan for the future. And if you’re working with cremation, you may also be balancing practical decisions about pet cremation urns, keepsake urns, small cremation urns, and even cremation jewelry that allows different family members to carry a tiny portion of ashes close.
This guide walks through those options in a calm, realistic way—so you can build something meaningful now, and still feel prepared for whatever comes later.
Why shared memorials are becoming more common
Even families who never pictured themselves choosing cremation often find that it becomes part of their life story—especially over time, and especially with pets. In the United States overall, cremation has become the majority choice. According to the National Funeral Directors Association, the U.S. cremation rate is projected to reach 63.4% in 2025, more than double the burial rate.
Cremation trends are also tracked year after year by the Cremation Association of North America, which publishes annual statistics reports using U.S. and Canadian data.
What this means in everyday life is simple: more households are living with ashes—sometimes for one loved one, sometimes for several, and sometimes across many years. Eventually, families want a plan that feels steady. A shared memorial can be that plan: not rushed, not dramatic, just thoughtfully built.
Start with the emotional “shape” of the memorial
Before you choose a marker or decide where to place ashes, it helps to name what you want this memorial to do for you.
Some shared memorials are meant to be visited—something you walk out to with a cup of coffee, or touch on anniversaries. Others are meant to be lived with—an at-home display that quietly belongs to the rhythm of daily life. If you’re leaning toward a home memorial, Funeral.com’s guide on keeping ashes at home can help you think through safety, placement, and comfort levels among family members. Here’s that resource: Keeping Ashes at Home: How to Do It Safely, Respectfully, and Legally.
When you think about multiple pets, you may also notice that each animal had a different “place” in your life. A shared memorial doesn’t have to flatten those differences. The best ones don’t. They give each pet a name and a presence, while still creating one comforting center of gravity.
A shared memorial at home: grouping urns with intention
For many families, the most natural shared memorial begins indoors. It might start accidentally—one urn on a shelf—and then become something more deliberate when another loss happens. At that point, questions show up: Do we keep each urn separate? Do we choose a single container? Do we create a single display?
There’s no one right answer, but there are a few approaches that tend to feel good long-term.
Multiple urns, one unified display
This is the most common approach: you select individual pet urns that fit each pet’s personality, and then design a single shared space around them. Families often find comfort in using a consistent “visual language” so the memorial feels cohesive—matching materials, similar shapes, or a repeated engraving style—even if the urns aren’t identical.
A gentle place to browse is Funeral.com’s Pet Cremation Urns for Ashes collection. It includes a wide range of styles, so you can choose separate urns without the space looking chaotic.
If your pets were especially distinct (the dignified old cat, the goofy puppy, the tiny bird with a big attitude), figurine urns can feel like a warm fit because they look like art, not storage. Funeral.com’s Pet Figurine Cremation Urns for Ashes collection shows how this style can turn a shared memorial into something that feels like a story you can see.
One primary urn, plus keepsakes for the “shared” feeling
Sometimes families want a shared memorial that is literally shared—because different people loved different pets, or because ashes are spread across households after a move or a divorce, or because adult children want to hold onto the animals they grew up with.
That’s where keepsake urns and small cremation urns become quietly helpful. You might keep each pet’s ashes in a primary urn, but also create a shared “family set” of keepsakes that can sit together, be carried, or be placed in multiple locations.
For people, Funeral.com’s Keepsake Cremation Urns for Ashes and Small Cremation Urns for Ashes collections show the difference between truly small keepsakes and larger portion-style urns.
For pets specifically, the Pet Keepsake Cremation Urns for Ashes collection is designed for that “a little portion, held close” purpose.
If you’re trying to make decisions that will still feel sensible five or ten years from now, it can help to read Funeral.com’s scenario-based guide: How to Choose a Cremation Urn That Actually Fits Your Plans. It’s written for real-life situations—home, burial, travel, scattering—and it applies beautifully to multi-pet planning.
A shared memorial outdoors: group graves and garden spaces
When families imagine a shared memorial, many picture a garden corner—a place that feels alive, not clinical. If you have a yard, this can be deeply comforting: a tree planted after your first pet, a stone added after the next, a small marker that gathers the names together.
Group graves in a pet cemetery
If you use a pet cemetery (or a section of a cemetery that allows pets), ask about rules before you design anything. Some places allow one marker for multiple pets, while others require separate markers even if the plots are adjacent. Some require an outer container for urn burial. Some have limits on materials or size.
If your plan includes burying urns, think in “systems,” not single events. In other words: plan for the next time you might need to add another pet. Will there be room? Will the marker still make sense? Can the engraving be updated, or will you want an add-on plaque?
A backyard memorial corner
For families who bury pets at home, a shared corner can reduce the pressure of choosing “the perfect spot” each time. You can dedicate a space with simple boundaries—stones, a small fence, a plant border—and allow the memorial to grow with your life.
If urn burial is part of your plan, choose containers that match your setting. Some families prefer burial-specific options for outdoor placements, while others use a standard urn placed inside a protective container. If you’re also memorializing people in your family, you may find yourself browsing cremation urns and cremation urns for ashes alongside pet options, simply because you’re building one long-term approach. Funeral.com’s Cremation Urns for Ashes collection can be useful in that broader planning sense.
And if you’re drawn to nature-based ceremonies—whether for a person or a pet—water and biodegradable options sometimes become part of the conversation. Funeral.com’s guide Understanding What Happens During a Water Burial Ceremony explains how families plan those moments with care.
One marker, many names: how to make it feel thoughtful (not crowded)
A shared memorial marker is one of the most tender details—because it turns private grief into visible belonging. But it can also feel hard to design. Families worry about leaving someone out, running out of space, or making the memorial feel like a list.
A helpful way to think about it is “readability first, emotion second.” If the marker is easy to read, the feeling will come through naturally. If it’s cramped, the marker can feel stressful to look at—even if the words are perfect.
Here are a few options that tend to work well when arranging multiple names (and this is one of the rare moments where a short list is genuinely clearer than a paragraph):
- Name + years (or dates) for each pet, in the same format
- A shared phrase at the top (one line), with names below
- One primary stone, with small add-on plaques as the memorial grows
If you’re choosing engraving on urns instead (or in addition), engraved surfaces can carry the details that a stone can’t. Some families engrave just the name on each urn, and reserve the marker for a shared phrase that holds everyone together.
When cremation jewelry becomes part of a multi-pet memorial
Families sometimes feel surprised by how comforting cremation jewelry can be—especially when the memorial includes multiple pets and multiple grievers. A shared garden marker might be perfect for you, but a teenager in the house may want something private. A spouse may want one pet’s ashes nearby at work. Someone who lives out of state may want a small connection that doesn’t require shipping a full urn.
That’s where cremation necklaces and other jewelry keepsakes become less like “an item” and more like a bridge between people.
Funeral.com’s Cremation Jewelry collection and Cremation Necklaces collection are helpful starting points when you want to see what feels wearable, subtle, and secure.
And if you want the gentle, practical explanation first, this guide is worth reading: Cremation Jewelry: A Gentle, Practical Guide to Keeping Someone Close.
In a multi-pet memorial, jewelry can also solve a quiet emotional problem: sometimes you love all the pets, but one was “your” soul companion. A tiny portion carried close can honor that bond without disrupting the shared nature of the main memorial.
Funeral planning for pets and people: the practical side families rarely talk about
When you’re caring for multiple pets across a lifetime, you’re also doing a kind of long-range funeral planning—even if you’d never call it that. You’re making decisions about what to keep, what to display, what to bury, what to scatter, what to pass down, and what your home can realistically hold.
One of the most grounding parts of long-term planning is simply understanding costs so you don’t get forced into rushed choices. If you’re asking questions like how much does cremation cost, Funeral.com’s guide How Much Does Cremation Cost? Average Prices and Budget-Friendly Options breaks down typical ranges and what’s included.
This matters for shared memorials because families often want consistency. If you choose one style of urn for one pet, you may want the option to continue that style later. A plan that fits your budget makes it more likely you’ll stick with it—and that the memorial will feel cohesive instead of improvised.
How to organize ashes from multiple pets without feeling overwhelmed
This is the part families rarely admit out loud: when you have multiple sets of ashes, you may also have multiple boxes, paperwork, temporary containers, and “we’ll decide later” piles. None of that means you loved them less. It just means grief happened in real life.
A simple approach is to create one dedicated container—an archival box or a drawer—and keep each pet’s paperwork and any temporary container together until you’re ready. If you’re already choosing urns, it can help to make one shared decision that reduces future stress, like deciding now whether you want most of the ashes in pet urns for ashes, or whether you want a portion in keepsake urns, or whether you want to include cremation jewelry as part of the plan.
If you want a gentle, pet-specific overview that walks through size, materials, personalization, and what families actually do in practice, this Funeral.com guide is a strong companion: Pet Urns for Ashes: A Complete Guide for Dog and Cat Owners.
What a “finished” shared memorial really looks like
A shared memorial doesn’t have to be finished to be meaningful. In fact, the most loving multi-pet memorials are often designed to stay a little open—because love is open. Your life may change. You may move. You may add a new pet to your family years from now and feel, unexpectedly, like you’re starting the story again.
A good shared memorial gives you a place to return to without demanding that you get everything right the first time. It can be a garden corner that grows, a shelf that shifts, a marker that gains a small plaque, a set of urns that finally look like they belong together. The goal isn’t perfection. The goal is comfort—something steady you can recognize when grief turns the volume up.
