For anyone who has loved a dog, it is difficult to imagine that such creatures are not with us after we die. The people of Colima in western Mexico certainly believed so, placing sculptures of dogs in various playful, familiar poses in burials. They believed that the dog spirits, as in life, would guide the deceased through the underworld. It’s an idea tethered to physical life on earth, and the notion that a lifeless object buried with a lifeless body means the same to the dead as the living. But—how lovely. For me, their spirits are always with us.

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