After Crash, LI Funeral Worker Finds New Calling Helping Grieving Pet Owners

LONG ISLAND, NY — About seven weeks after Ty Morrison said he was hit by a driver he described as drunk on Route 135 near Plainview, the funeral-service worker found himself facing a different kind of challenge.

The crash, Morrison said, left him unable to continue some of the physical work he had been doing at a funeral home. He was still going through a long recovery, with months of rehabilitation ahead.

But the crash also pushed him toward something he had already started building on the side: a pet aftercare business designed to help grieving owners say goodbye in a gentler, more environmentally conscious way.

“After my crash, I couldn’t do the same things,” Morrison said. “I couldn’t do the removals, I couldn’t do the embalmings and the funeral services, so I had to hone in on this.”

Gentle Tide Pet Aquamation is run by Morrison, who lives in Farmingdale, and his older brother, Derek Morrison of Northport. The company offers aquamation, also known as water cremation, for pets across Long Island, Westchester County and New York City’s five boroughs.

Instead of using flame, the process uses water, alkaline minerals, warmth and circulation to break down organic material in a way the company describes as a gentler alternative to traditional cremation.

The Morrison brothers say Gentle Tide is more than a business built around a newer form of pet aftercare. It is also a family-run venture shaped by funeral work, military service and the question many pet owners are forced to ask in the worst moment.

“The first question everyone had was, ‘What do I do when my pet dies?’” Derek Morrison said. “Like, no one knows.”

Derek said that uncertainty is exactly what Gentle Tide is trying to address. A family may be grieving, their pet may have died at home, and they may have no idea whom to call or what steps to take. Gentle Tide’s goal, he said, is to make the process clear and manageable.

“For us, the mindset is making that process easy in a grieving moment,” Derek said. “Making a hard thing easy.”

Ty Morrison said the idea began last summer while he was working for Haven Funeral Services in Ozone Park as an assistant funeral director. His duties included removals, embalming, cosmetics and other funeral-home work. He had entered the mortuary field during the COVID-19 pandemic while living in Oklahoma City, where he worked at Alpha Omega Mortuary.

Over time, Morrison said, the work became more meaningful because he was helping families navigate loss.

The idea for pet aftercare came during a day spent riding with the funeral home’s owner. Morrison said the owner received a call from someone whose cat had died.

“Oh, so sorry for your loss, but we do people, we don’t do pets,” Morrison recalled him saying.

About an hour later, another call came in about a dog. Then another came in about another dog. By the third call, Morrison said, he saw a need.

“Two hours later, he gets a call about another dog, and I pulled over,” Morrison said. “I said, ‘Why don’t we do pets?’”

Morrison understood direct cremation from the funeral industry and adapted that model for pets.

At first, he used a pet crematory in West Babylon. Later, he switched to aquamation after learning more about the process. The difference, he said, immediately made sense to him.

“It’s more efficient; people are getting 100 percent of their pet back,” Morrison said. “It’s a gentler process. There are no carbon emissions.”

Gentle Tide markets aquamation as a water-based alternative to flame cremation. The company’s launch announcement said aquamation uses warm-water flow, temperature and alkaline minerals to accelerate the natural decomposition process. The process eliminates intense fire and avoids fossil fuel combustion, according to the company.

Morrison explains it to families by comparing it with what happens in nature. When an animal dies in the woods, he said, it decomposes and its organic material returns to the earth.

“With alkaline hydrolysis, we imitate that with 95 percent water, 5 percent alkaline,” he said.

Morrison said his goal is not to criticize families who have chosen traditional cremation in the past, but to let people know there is another option.

“What we want people to understand is that there’s an alternative," Morrison said. "We have the technology to be more efficient, more eco-friendly, and more natural.”

Derek Morrison, who joined the business as he prepared to transition out of full-time military service, said he came to see the company’s work through the lens of helping people at a difficult point in their lives.

Derek joined the military in 2007, when he was 19. He said he originally joined the Air National Guard intending to go back to school full time while serving one weekend a month. Instead, after returning from Air Force technical school, he began working full time with the Guard.

By September, he said, he would have 19 years in. As he looked toward leaving full-time military work and returning to a traditional Guard schedule of one weekend a month and two weeks a year, he had to decide what would come next.

When Ty brought up aquamation, Derek said it was not initially the future he had imagined for himself. But the more he thought about it, the more he saw a connection between the business and the sense of duty he had carried in the military.

“Being able to help people, it’s kind of ingrained in me,” he said.

He said many people see pets as members of their family, and the death of a pet can create a real grieving period.

“Being there to support them, their family and their ‘fur’ family, I think that’s a big deal to me,” Derek said. “It gives me a sense of purpose as I transitioned out of the military.”

He said that sense of purpose is important because many service members struggle after leaving the structure of military life.

For Ty, the sense of purpose came through funeral work before it came through pet aftercare. He said working with grieving families — from the first consultation to removals, services, wakes and arrangements — was more fulfilling than earlier jobs in sales.

“Me working at the funeral home, that was a lot more enriching and fulfilling, and being there to be able to console grieving family to help them navigate through the grieving process,” Morrison said. “That was my purpose. God has an assignment for me. I took that very seriously.”

After the crash, Morrison said, he struggled with feeling sidelined. He said he went from feeling like an asset to feeling like a burden at home. His brother, fiancée and father helped pull him out of that low point.

“I did get into a little depression after my crash, because I wasn’t doing anything at all,” he said.

Gentle Tide became the answer.

The brothers were born in Oklahoma but moved to Long Island when they were young. Derek said he was about 3; Ty was a baby. They grew up in Amityville and attended the Copiague School District, graduating from Copiague High School. Ty later returned to Oklahoma for about 14 years before coming back to New York last summer. Derek remained mostly on Long Island while serving in the military, aside from deployments and travel connected to his service.

For now, much of the work is education. Ty said families who use the service have responded well, but many veterinary offices and pet owners still do not know aquamation exists.

“It’s just really getting the education out there,” he said.

Ty told the story of a woman in Jamaica, Queens, whose 20-year-old pigeon died after spending its life as a family pet. Because the bird was so small, he said, aquamation allowed the family to receive remains that would have been difficult to recover through flame cremation.

The woman also received a small bottle of nutrient-rich water, he said, which she used to plant hydrangeas in the bird’s memory.

What began as an unanswered question at a funeral home — why not pets? — has become a family business built to help people through one of the hardest parts of loving an animal.

“Some people see their pets as part of family,” Derek said. “Being there to support them — that’s a big deal to me.”