I think my dead dog, Maggie, is communicating with me through FM radio

Weird, but a beloved dog and a UK aid worker turned viral sensation have combined to make death a theme right now for me. Something that’s hijacking a lot of focus from the normality of Aldi catalogues and conversations about weather and Insta photos of all you lucky bastards on boats in Europe.

Weirder, I’m embracing it as, well, not quite an old friend but something not to fear. A coming adventure with no designated start date but something I need to be ready for.

Kate Halfpenny’s late dog, Maggie.

It started when our dog Maggie died. Tons of you wrote beautiful emails and cards about the loss of your own companions, about how it helped to see pain as misplaced love. About life and death and what it all means.

But then I became convinced Maggie was reaching out too.

Every second day, I’d start the car and Foo Fighters would be mid-song. Generator, My Hero, Everlong. Over the journey, Maggie heard a lot of Fooeys. She’d get jazzy when she heard Dave Grohl’s voice. When she left us, Learn To Fly was playing.

One morning, my husband is with me. Car is turned on. No song, but a man is talking. “This guy sounds like Dave Grohl.” Because it was Dave Grohl.

It’s important to know I’m the least woo-woo person ever. An eye roller when anybody says they’ve visited a psychic. Scorner of horoscopes, long-time believer that when you die, that’s all she wrote, folks.

Now, I’m pretty convinced an old ghostly dog is somehow in charge of commercial radio programming to say, hey, I’m still here. Yep, I’m probably just unhinged by grief but it helps at 57 to have something prodding me into seriously considering the possibility of an afterlife.

Maggie dressed as Jeannie.

Also inspiring that is the aforementioned aid worker, Simon Boas. In February, after being diagnosed with terminal cancer, Boas wrote a cheerful, stoic letter in the Jersey Evening Post on how to do life and death well.

It was reprinted globally. Read by millions. A UK radio station had Boas record it. King Charles wrote to him. Celebrants too, asking if they could quote him at funerals.

What intrigued audiences was Boas’ embracing of his fate. He wrote being born at all is “like hitting the jackpot.” We should be “dazzled” by that good fortune, he said, “dancing on the tables every day”.

His own life was bountiful: “I have seen whales and tigers and bears in the wild. I’ve rolled a car, been shot in the leg and pulled one of my own teeth out. The Times has printed eight of my letters, and I have recently vanity-published an exceptionally rude poem about cyclists.

“Most of all, I have loved and been loved. I’m cocooned in the stuff.”

His goal in sharing his mortality? “To try to explain this apparent paradox: that it is possible to leave life with a sense of equanimity not because one is fed up with it, but because one loves it so much.”

Boas said he was glad to have months for “deathmin” before he left. Reading that prompted me to order two copies of a handbook called F*ck It! I’m Dead for me and Chris. You write down all the stuff those left behind will need to know – financial details, passwords, letters, bills.

And funeral wishes. I’m into it. Everyone I’ve asked to be a pallbearer has said yes and my daughter’s friend Ciara has agreed to play Aerosmith’s I Don’t Want To Miss a Thing on violin before an afternoon disco and the eventual flinging of my ashy self into the sea at Bicheno in Tassie.

Simon Boas (and Maggie) might be behind the velvet curtain to meet me. Aged 47, he died this week, hours before he was due to meet the King and Queen. In September, his book A Beginner’s Guide to Dying will be published.

“Nobody knows whether there’s a God, or an afterlife, but it seems unlikely to me that our existence is merely a brief and random flash of consciousness between two eternities of nothing,” he wrote of one thing about death that comforted him.

“What will survive of us is love.”

Kate Halfpenny is the founder of Bad Mother Media.

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