Death of a Loved One or Pet

We grieve in proportion to how much we love. Grief is normal and to be expected. Sometimes tears come when you least expect them and don’t come when you might expect them most. It’s okay to cry when your emotions are tender or close to the surface, and it helps to do so rather than hold back in an effort to be stoic when we lose someone we love–a spouse, child, friend, or close pet. Hope helps lift us. There is a plan that is bigger than death. There is life after death and all will be resurrected–given an immortal body that reunites with the eternal spirit. God said, and it’s true, that “As in Adam (the first man) all die, so, too in Christ (through Him), shall all (that’s your loved one too) be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:22)

As far as loved ones go, it may help to think of death as a doorway into eternity. Those who have lived the best they know how are in a place of rest, a spiritual place known as paradise in the spirit world. Those who have lived lower or lesser lives will have opportunity to experience deep regret and make progress to a better spiritual state, a chance to accept the gospel, which includes everything necessary for their forgiveness, eternal life, and happiness.

Animals have spirits too.  They live beyond this life. They, too, will be resurrected and become immortal–no longer subject to death. Some of these things are treated in Genesis and some have been restated in modern revelation very clearly–as in a book of God’s word known as The Doctrine and Covenants, as follows:

For all old things shall pass away, and all things shall become new, even the heaven and the earth, and all the fulness thereof, both men and beasts, the fowls of the air, and the fishes of the sea;

And not one hair, neither mote, shall be lost, for it is the workmanship of mine hand. (D. & C. 29:22-25.)