Do Our Pets Survive Beyond Death?

Back during my early 20s, I became friends with a woman my age from Norway who’d been raised in a heavily intellectual family: her father was a linguistics professor who spoke fifteen languages, while her mother was a respected journalist. Like her parents, she was fairly skeptical about anything paranormal herself—ESP, ghosts, UFOs, you name it. When I told her about anomalous phenomena I’d read about or even experienced myself, she was polite but always suggested more prosaic explanations.

Many years later we reconnected and she told me a story of something she recently experienced that put a different spin on all of this for her. There was a man in her family’s condominium complex outside of Oslo who used to walk his dog every day around the small lake at the center of the complex. Eventually, the dog died but the man continued his daily walks by himself. But one day while visiting her parents my friend happened to be looking out the window and saw the man out on his daily walk—but this time there was the phantom image of his deceased dog running and leaping alongside him, just like it had always done while still alive. The image lasted for about seven or eight seconds before eventually fading away, she said. She also mentioned that it didn’t seem like the man was aware of the dog’s presence alongside him.

Needless to say, this came as a huge shock to her, since it was so contrary to her preconceptions. Yet that’s what made her story so compelling to me—the fact that she wasn’t in the slightest predisposed to believe such things beforehand. In fact, quite the opposite.

I’ve heard many more stories along these lines through the years—individuals saying they caught glimpses of a deceased dog moving through their house, or someone feeling the presence of a long-departed cat in bed with them, and other such things. I remember in my teens when I sat by our family dog as he passed; while she wasn’t present at the time my highly sensitive mother somehow knew the moment it happened. As she said later, “I felt his spirit pass through me. I knew he was gone.”

I haven’t had any experiences involving animals quite like those myself, but I’m open to the possibility simply because I don’t believe consciousness is limited to the body—whether that body be animal or human.

But it raises another question I’ve heard posed many times as well—namely, will our deceased pets be there to greet us when we pass over?

To my mind, this is a more complicated matter, for a variety or reasons. But I’m open to that possibility as well. I say that because of a number of near-death experience (NDE) accounts I’ve heard from people who claim to have encountered their pets on the other side when they slipped temporarily beyond the veil. It’s certainly possible those individuals could have been hallucinating, or perhaps seeing some sort of astral recreations of their long-departed pets and not the pets themselves—we simply don’t know. I do find it encouraging, though.

There is one extremely moving story along these lines I heard recently which I’ll close with. It was shared with me by my friend Judith, and involved a short but extraordinary video taken by the daughter of one of her relatives, showing the final minutes of life of Judith’s sister-in-law, Kathy, at age 95. It made for an extraordinary scene—seeing her almost glow as a beatific smile slowly came across her face. And while it was hard to hear on the video, Kathy’s daughter said that in those final moments her mom became extremely happy because she was talking to her deceased dog, who appeared to her in those last minutes. (An important detail: according to her daughter, Kathy hadn’t actually spoken at all since undergoing brain surgery two years earlier; the words she whispered to her departed dog were the first ones she had uttered audibly in those two years.)

So, was it really her dog that she saw, or just a hallucination? There’s no way to really know. Either way, here’s to hoping we all experience our final moments as beautifully and peacefully as Kathy did.

p.s. Literally minutes after posting this piece, the following short video crossed my Facebook feed, which deals specifically with this topic—I’m including it here:

I normally make the comments section open only to paid subscribers on my Substack page, but will leave it open this time to anyone who might be inclined to share their own stories about experiences involving deceased pets.

Ray Grasse is a writer, astrologer, and photographer living in the American Midwest. He is author of ten books, most recently In the Company of Gods and So, What Am I Doing Here, Anyway? His websites are www.raygrasse.com and www.raygrassephotography.com.