Welcome to the Lighthouse pet loss grief support site! We're here to help you, offering memorial pages on our website, resources to help you cope and heal, and understanding and compassionate support from our online community, via our boards and chat rooms.

Our community has two message boards, with chat rooms on each.

You're currently looking at Lighthouse Beacon -- our smaller, newer board -- which can be read by guests but requires registration to post messages.

Our larger, original board, with over 100,000 messages, is The Lighthouse -- registration is required to read that board, as well as to post.

Please see my blog, The Lighthouse By Rainbow Bridge, and our main website, The Lighthouse, for more information about both boards and registering for each.

We have two message boards because when our site was created three years ago, I quickly learned that many of our members preferred the relative privacy of a board that required registration to read as well as post. This is understandable -- support groups don't meet in public offline.

But many people looking for support online might be hesitant to join a group right away. When I first started looking for support in 2003 after losing my kitty Sinbad, I read messages on another board -- one that I later moderated for three years -- before finally, after 10 days of reading, deciding to register and start posting messages to ask for support directly.

In the meantime, it had helped me to be able to read other people's posts and the replies to them. I found much there that I could identify with, and much that was comforting.

So because public messages can be very helpful to others, even people who never register and ask for support, our second board -- this one, Lighthouse Beacon -- was created in 2007, so we can make more resources available to guests as well as members. And so we can help members here as well as at the Lighthouse, if they want to register here.

I hope you'll register for both of our message boards.

Our larger board, The Lighthouse, still offers more resources to help people who are grieving, including many more topics posted by members about their own experiences. I am going to be copying more of those topics to this board in the future (after checking with everyone who posted in the topics to get their okay), but I haven't had much time for that yet.

This public board, Lighthouse Beacon, offers some advantages that The Lighthouse, which requires registration to read, can't offer.

A public board is ideal if you want to post a tribute to your pet, or other messages about your pet, that anyone will be able to read, if you send them the link.

A public board is the best place to post if you want to recommend a book or something else that has particularly helped you, in a message you can refer other people to, without them having to register for the board as well. And the messages here at Lighthouse Beacon, unlike the messages at The Lighthouse, are picked up and indexed by search engines -- which means people searching for opinions on a book or something else you post about may very well turn them up in a search, so you're reaching a wider audience.

A public board is a good place to share those experiences you're comfortable sharing, when you feel others will be helped to read about them.

A public board is also the best place to post news and alerts of any type that belong on a pet message board, whether about pet food recalls or rescues/shelters that need help. The Lighthouse has hundreds of members, but you reach a much wider audience posting at the Beacon because of guests reading messages here.

Both our boards offer advantages the other can't offer, so I hope you'll register for both. You can register with the same member name on both (and that would be best for avoiding confusion), but the way we validate/approve registrations is slightly different for the two boards. Our blog has more detailed information about that.

We're here for you, if you've lost a pet or are facing an impending loss. We all know how much it hurts to lose a pet, and how much it helps to be able to talk about that loss with people who understand. We've all been helped by others, and we want to offer the same help to anyone looking for support.

Cindy Morgan (SinbadsMom)