Do Dogs Go to Heaven? Saying Goodbye to Our Good Little Cockapoo Blondie
On April 16, 2026 by Reading Time: 3 minutes
“What shall we wrap her in?” I asked my oldest daughter, Joy. “It’s too hot for a fuzzy blanket. Do you have an extra twin sheet in your room?”
“Yes, I think so,” she said through tears, our eyes locked.
“And it can’t be a fitted sheet. We can’t have that elastic in the edges. It must be a straight sheet.”
She nodded in agreement and went upstairs to see what she could find.
Blondie, our beloved cockapoo of fifteen years, lay listless in my youngest daughter’s lap, between her brother and her fiancé. After digging a small grave in the backyard at the perfect spot we had picked out, the three of them were hot and sweaty.
Hours earlier, I had scheduled an appointment with Lap of Love, an in-home euthanasia service. I hate death and didn’t wish to rush it along, but our good little dog had cancer and had quit eating and drinking.
“Oh, this is perfect,” I declared when Joy returned with a straight twin sheet, a lovely white cotton one covered in vines with dainty leaves in various shades of green.
Blondie lay in my lap when the veterinarian came. All three of my children sat close, each with a hand on our beloved dog. My husband, soon-to-be son-in-law, and dad filled the remaining space in the living room. “Blondie’s a good girl,” I repeated over and over through a stream of tears pouring down my flsushed cheeks—Blondie always wagged her tail when I said these words, even when she was lying down with her eyes shut, which always delighted the children and me. But in these last hours of life, she had lost the power to move.
When life left her body, my son scooped her from my arms and wrapped her in the perfect sheet. He carried her outside to the grave dug just for her. Wishing to honor my little dog for a job well done, I clipped the tops off all four daisies I had received for Mother’s Day. I placed a flower on the lifeless bundle and passed out the other three to my children, who followed my lead.
The Mother’s Day daisies were especially fitting. Blondie had helped me mother my children. She followed them around, performed her best tricks at their every command, spot-mopped the kitchen floor with her tongue, and took turns sleeping with each one, collecting their tears in her fur when they cried.
My husband began to cover her with the fresh dirt piled up beside the hole.
In that little grave, we buried her body and planted a Texas Mountain Laurel, my daughter Glory’s favorite tree, which blooms in royal purple each spring.
Watching the tree grow in the days to come stirred old questions. When I was a young person, I was told animals don’t have souls, and they don’t go to heaven. I was heartbroken at the thought, but I was the sort of child who trusted what I was taught with little question. My children are different.
When a leader at church told my teenage daughter, Joy, the same thing almost a decade before Blondie’s passing, she went home to see what the Bible said about it. She found several verses that unsettled what she’d been told—verses that spoke of animals as “living souls” (Gen 9:10) and one that simply asked, who really knows where the spirit of the animal goes? (Ecclesiastes 3:21)
We buried Blondie on May 11, 2022. The little girl inside me hoped to see Blondie again, but I wasn’t sure. Two years later, when meditating on Romans 8, the words in verse 21 stood out to me, “creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.”
I read the verse again, replacing the words “creation itself” with “Blondie herself,” and felt my heart smile with satisfaction, trusting our good little dog would be with us again.
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Photo of Blondie Taken by a Burgin Child (I can’t remember which one)
