Animals and the Afterlife (3 page)

My second rat, a little white angel named Sweetheart, died while I was at school. I discovered Sweetheart’s lifeless body when I got home and went to let her out of her cage to play, as I did each afternoon. Following the shock and the tears was absolute wonder. This was a first in my life. Sure, I had seen dead animals before. Roadkill and most of the baby birds I had rescued and tried to nurture back to health—the ones that didn’t make it—had taught me a little bit about the permanence of death. However, I had never before seen the dead body of someone I really loved—someone who had been my constant companion for several years.

Sweetheart had been so active, so playful and busy, always wiggling her little rat nose, finding clever ways to steal my Halloween candy, and willingly tackling any maze or suspension bridge my brother and I set up for her.

Now she was so different. So stiff and cold and still. Unlike cartoon characters, she wasn’t back to her old self the next day. I made a pretty little coffin for her and observed her body for a day or two before burying her. I invited my friends over to see her body. I petted her and looked at her and cried over her. I think I needed that time to really comprehend what had happened. I had to really look at death and somehow find a way to accept it.

And that was my experience of death for many years, with many more animals and also with my grandparents and other people, including one of my schoolmates who just stopped showing up one day. Over and over, they died when I wasn’t around to see it happen. I always either discovered their lifeless bodies after the fact and knew what had happened; or, more often, I was merely
informed
of what had happened. This was the case with my second dog, a feisty sheltie named Charger. One morning, he wouldn’t eat, couldn’t walk, and moaned in agony. My parents and I rushed him to the vet, who said we’d have to leave him there for some tests. That afternoon, I cried as my parents told me the vet had discovered an inoperable tumor and had put him “to sleep”; and I knew I’d never see him again. He was only eight years old.

Never any long, drawn-out event. Just instant death. Over and over, I had seen life, and I had seen death, but I had never really seen the part that comes in between: the dying process. Often that’s the hardest part, so it seems that life protected me until I was ready to handle it.

That day came during my first year in college. My best buddy was a sweet little guy named Ben, a black and white hooded rat (white with a black “hood” that covered his head and shoulders, then tapered down his back) who shared my room and sat on my lap while I did my homework. He rode around on my shoulder each day, ran around my room each evening, and snuggled up against my cheek each night. His death was a very long, drawn-out process. I became completely absorbed in his care, taking him to the vet almost daily and trying every remedy and treatment available.

My heart ached as Ben’s little body weakened. We both suffered. I just couldn’t let him go. I made and canceled the euthanasia appointment perhaps a dozen times before I finally went through with it. After the fact, I regretted not having gone into the back room with him for that final visit. The vet had advised against it, knowing how distraught I was. So I sat and cried in the waiting room until Ben’s body was brought out to me in a little box. It was years before I would let myself love another animal after that.

W
HILE ATTENDING COLLEGE
, I had a part-time job. One day while driving to work, the car in front of me hit a beautiful black dog. The car kept going, but I pulled over, devastated. I dragged the heavy dog’s lifeless form over to the curb and cried over him. He had no tags. I wondered if anyone loved him. I wondered if anyone was missing him. I wondered why the driver hadn’t stopped. I wondered if anyone cared. But mostly, I wondered where the dog’s spirit had gone. What was this thing called Death, that could so instantly change an active, carefree creature into a still pile of long, curly fur? A part of me just had to know—but I was late for work and had a time clock to answer to.

After college, my brother and his dog Reindeer (who looked just like a little reindeer) became my roommates. I was delighted to finally have an animal back in my life, and Reindeer and I quickly became quite attached to one another. Shortly thereafter, Reindeer became ill and I found myself involved in her dying process. She was too young to die. Why did this keep happening? Again came the heartache and the uncertainty surrounding euthanasia.

When the day to end her suffering finally arrived, I determined that
this
time I’d be there, right to the end. My brother and I took her to the vet for that final visit. We sat on the floor and held her close as she took her final breath. Instinctively, we both looked up toward the ceiling and waved good-bye as her spirit left her body and traveled on in her journey. We didn’t
see
anything, but we just
knew
she had a soul that continued on. I remember the certainty I felt in that moment.

It reminded me of a childhood game my brother and I had often played. We had a large collection of dolls, including many versions of Barbie®, Ken®, Big Jim, and G.I. Joe. One of the dolls came with a plastic life jacket, and we pretended that the life jacket was a “soul.” Whenever we decided that one of the dolls was dying, we put the life jacket on that doll. When the doll died, we removed the life jacket (the “soul”) and made it float up from the floor to Heaven. Eventually, all of the dolls died, at which time we put all of the dolls up on the bed (“Heaven”) and continued our play with them. They interacted just as they had when they were “alive,” but they were now in a higher place. It made sense to us. Life after death was a given.

Another favorite childhood game of mine was “Noah’s Ark.” I had a little toy ark, little dolls of Noah and his family, and a whole collection of little animals, two of each kind. I always took my job very seriously as I saw to it that all of the animals were safely on the ark before the flood came. I had known and loved many animals, so I completely understood why Noah made an ark large enough to save all of them, and not just himself. I wondered why more people weren’t so concerned about the well-being of animals, that amazing variety of beings with whom we share our world. I figured Noah had put forth a tremendous effort to make an ark big enough for them all. I respected him for his selfless compassion and wished there were more people like him in the world.

I guess I always felt in my heart that animals had souls, just like us. I was raised Christian and taught that if I was good, I’d go to Heaven. Every animal I had known was at least as good as me, so
of course
they had a spot reserved for them beyond the Pearly Gates. When I asked the pastor of our church if he thought animals went to Heaven, he responded by stating that if dogs
didn’t
go to Heaven, he wouldn’t want to go there either. That was a pretty bold statement coming from a pastor, but then again, this was a man who loved his dog.

The older I got, the more I questioned things. That was certainly the case with death. As a child, the afterlife was a given. When I got older, I wasn’t so sure. Where
did
they go, really? Was Heaven just a place we invented to ease the pain? Was there any proof of it? I was pretty convinced that ghosts existed, but beyond that, I wasn’t sure. Where was the concrete evidence?

I’
VE BEEN FASCINATED WITH GHOSTS
and the paranormal for as long as I can remember. My interest in the paranormal was perhaps initially fueled by a wide assortment of psychic experiences throughout childhood that left me confused, sometimes frightened, and always fascinated, determined to understand what was really going on.

Somehow, I seemed to know things without understanding
how
I knew them. My earliest recollection of this goes back to when I was five years old and my family moved from Los Angeles to San Diego. My dad had already picked out a rental house, which the rest of us had never seen before the day we moved in, yet as our moving truck entered the new neighborhood, I instantly knew which house was ours. I didn’t know
how
I knew, but I was
certain
which house it was, as if I had already seen it; and that was indeed the driveway we pulled into. Such experiences occurred so regularly that I came to accept them as a normal part of life. However, I got the distinct impression that most other people didn’t have such experiences, so for many years I kept them to myself. There were times when these experiences literally saved my life, so although I didn’t completely understand them, I was grateful to have them.

My dreams were filled with detailed premonitions that usually came true the very next day and always came true eventually. These weren’t just vague images that I pieced together later; these were clear pictures and detailed facts about very unique and unexpected situations that always came to pass. To this day, I dream most nights of things to come, and it absolutely boggles my mind to think about it logically when the dreams come true, which they inevitably do. My logical mind simply can’t make sense of the ability to see things
before
they even happen. However, experience has shown me that there is a lot more to reality than that which is generally considered “logical.”

As a child, my precognitive dreams sometimes involved the death of someone I knew (or knew
of
, such as a neighbor or a friend’s parent), which always occurred quite unexpectedly shortly thereafter, sometimes the very next day. These premonitions frightened me. I recall one such dream, in which someone with diabetes had died. In this case, I wasn’t sure who the person was—or if the diabetes was even the cause of death—but for some reason, I knew that the person had diabetes, and I was very upset by their death. In the dream, I was sitting on the front porch, crying, and I watched helplessly as the person was rushed away in an ambulance. I knew that the person was going to die and there was nothing I could do about it.

I couldn’t get the dream out of my mind the next day as I sat in school. I’d had enough experiences such as this to know that it was going to come true. When I returned home from school, I began pacing my bedroom, trying desperately to think of who I knew that had diabetes so I could warn them. Just then, my dad called out to me from downstairs and said that the lady next door had frantically asked for my parents’ help because there was something terribly wrong with her husband, so my parents were heading next door.

I raced downstairs to see what was going on, and as I headed out the front door, it suddenly became clear to me
who
was going to die. I had never actually
met
the man next door and had no way of knowing if he did indeed have diabetes, yet I now knew it was
him
. I collapsed in tears on the front porch and helplessly looked on as the events unfolded just as I had already dreamt. I sat on the front porch, crying, as an ambulance carried our next-door neighbor away,
just like in the dream
.

When my mom returned and explained to me that my dad had accompanied the man’s distraught wife to the hospital, I informed her that he would soon be calling to let us know that the man had died; I had dreamed the whole thing the night before, right down to the details of that phone call.

The phone rang. It was my dad, delivering the news I already knew. He said the man had died, and there was some talk of whether or not it had been a complication of his
diabetes
. As it turned out, the man had died of a heart attack, but I now had my confirmation that he had indeed been diabetic, just like in the dream. I asked my mom why I had to know such awful things if I couldn’t do anything about them. She did her best to comfort me, but she didn’t know either.

When a similar dream—involving a man who attended our church—came true, my mom called the wife of our pastor, who was a good friend. The pastor’s wife was genuinely interested in my experiences but, unfortunately, she didn’t really have any insights to offer either. I had learned about prophets in Sunday school, so I knew that such things were known and believed by the Church and were by no means the work of the devil. I just didn’t understand why such experiences were so frightening, or why they were happening to
me
.

I often got the feeling that there were unseen presences in our home, especially at night, and this terrified me. So, after determining that hiding in a closet or sleeping in my parents’ room wasn’t going to make the fear go away, I was determined to understand what I was so afraid of. I believe the unknown is often scary just by virtue of being unfamiliar, so in hindsight, I suspect that the desire to understand my own fears was—at least in part—what originally sparked my interest in the afterlife.

While other children were out playing ball or hopscotch, I was often curled up with a book about ghosts, haunted houses, or other unexplained phenomena. I discovered many stories that provided tremendous evidence of life after death, but none of these stories specifically mentioned animals.

After reading piles of books containing photographs of ghosts, I began trying to capture them on film myself. Although I occasionally spotted some interesting-looking lights in the photos, nothing conclusive ever resulted from my efforts.

My brother, Scott, was my closest friend, and he shared my fascination with ghosts and such things. We spent countless hours reading real-life ghost stories aloud into a tape recorder, adding our own sound effects to heighten the drama. We took turns doing the narration and the voices of the various characters in the stories. To my knowledge, audio books didn’t yet exist back then, so perhaps those early recordings of ours were some of the original audio books. I like to think so, anyway.