Kim Sheridan is the author of the Animals and the Afterlife: True Stories of Our Best Friends’ Journey Beyond Death. She says that as more people have brought animals into their homes, they have increasingly come to see them as spiritual teachers and guides.

The Rev. Mitzi Lynton is an interfaith pastor who participated in a grief support Webinar for Best Friends Network that discussed how animals grieve and how people mourn the deaths of animals. She is based in Arizona.

Allen and Linda Anderson run the Angel Animals Network, a website for those who believe animals communicate and guide people before and after their deaths. They are the authors of numerous books about the spirituality of animals, including Angel Animals: Divine Messengers of Miracles and God’s Messengers: What Animals Teach Us About the Divine. They are based in Minneapolis.

Read a July 5, 2013, article from the Associated Press about the clearing of two former popes to become saints. Pope John Paul II was canonized as a result of a medical miracle in Costa Rica.

An ABCNews/Beliefnet poll conducted in 2001 found that 43 percent of people believe that pets go to heaven. Slightly fewer – 41 percent – said all animals, not just pets, go to heaven.

Read a Dec. 3, 2012, article from the Michigan Newsroom Radio about Jack Kevorkian’s legacy more than a year after his death.

Roberta Springer Loewy is an associate clinical professor of bioethics at the University of California, Davis. She is co-author of The Ethics of Terminal Care: Orchestrating the End of Life and the author of Integrity and Personhood: Looking at Patients From a Bio/Psycho/Social Perspective.

Stuart Rosenbaum is a philosophy professor at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, and co-editor of Caring for the Dying: Critical Issues at the Edge of Life.

Jos V.M. Welie is a professor of medical and dental ethics in the Center for Health Policy and Ethics at Creighton University in Omaha, Neb. He is co-author of Death and Medical Power: An Ethical Analysis of Dutch Euthanasia Practice.