My Dog Died, So I Called a Pet Medium

When my dog Minx died, the apartment didn’t just feel empty — it felt embarrassed. Like it didn’t know what to do with itself now that the most elegant creature in the universe had left.

Minx was a Spanish Galgo, black, slender, twenty-five kilos of lazy grace. She moved like a piece of silk in a breeze — besides from the fact that she rarely moved at all, except when she ran like a lunatic in circles. Mostly, she liked to sit perfectly straight, statuesque, as if she were waiting for someone to paint her.

She was beautiful, and she knew it.

Every morning she’d jump up to my bed and lean in, pressing her long, warm body against me like a partner in need of reassurance. Except when I’d left her with a dog sitter — then she’d punish me for days. No eye contact, no sighs, nothing. Just icy dignity.

She died suddenly on the first of October. One moment she was breathing, the next she wasn’t. No warning, no drama. Just a blood clot that paralyzed the back of her body, following the kind of decision no one prepares you for.

She was older, but I wasn’t ready. Are you ever?

For a while, I did what I always do when I mourn — I isolated. I locked myself in, half-dressed, half-functioning, staring at Minx’s empty bed like it might do a trick. While waiting for her ashes to arrive in a small green urn I’d picked out — the kind of object that feels both sacred and absurd on a kitchen shelf.

I started thinking about what a worthy funeral for a dog even looks like. I searched for pet mediums, but most of them only spoke to animals who were still alive — which somehow felt rude. Then a friend told me about Susan.

That’s how I found Susan Wagner, pet medium, somewhere in North America. She has no website, no marketing, just certainty: the people who need me will find me.

So I found her.

I’d tried therapy, antidepressants, yoga — none of them promised to help me talk to my dead dog.

When we met on Zoom, she didn’t ask for photos or background.“I don’t want any information,” she said. “Your dog’s been circling me for days.”

I laughed — a polite, skeptical laugh — but then something inside me folded. Because that was something Minx used to do when she was excited: big, fast circles, demanding attention, elegant even in chaos.

Susan said Minx hadn’t suffered. “It was like falling asleep,” she told me.

“She’s still around — visiting. She still jumps up to you in bed. She still checks on you.”

Then she said something else:

“She knows you’re missing her a lot.”

From there, the call drifted into something stranger, larger. Susan spoke in rhythms — half medium, half therapist. She said she could feel Minx’s energy wrapping around her, circling, proud to show she had her body back. “She’s like, Look at me, look at me,” Susan laughed.

“She’s happy. She’s healthy. She keeps saying, I’m here. I’m here.”

I found myself nodding, with wet eyes without realizing.

Minx showed her lounging on the couch, pretending not to care that I was home. “She’s chill, but she’s overexcited to see you,” Susan said. “She’s a couch potato with elegance.”

Susan said she could feel Minx climbing onto my bed in spirit “the little crevice,” she called it. “She still does that,” Susan added softly. “You two had your special moment there — every morning. She hasn’t left you. She still crawls up when you wake up.”

At some point, the session shifted. Susan said my grandmother appeared — my mother’s mother. “She’s saying, I’m with her,” Susan said. “She’s taking care of your precious baby girl. They’re together.”

She described my grandmother perfectly: elegant, warm, unselfish. Then she said she could feel her cold feet — diabetic feet, frozen from poor circulation. “She’s showing me her legs,” Susan said, explaining that she couldn't feel her feet, and that it often happens that she personifies the people she talks to.

Then my godmother appeared. “She wants to hug you,” Susan said, “kiss the top of your head and tell you everything’s going to be okay.”

My godmother had lost her voice before she died; Susan asked me about it as her own voice transformed. “I can’t speak, did she have a problem with her voice?” she said, touching her own throat. “She’s protecting you. She’s saying, It’s enough now.”

Susan had the same voice my godmother had before she passed.

Susan said the spirits were showing her patterns — family dynamics repeating across generations. “You’re mirroring what you saw as a child,” she said. “You think you can fix it through love. But your dog — she carried that for you. She mirrored your heartache until she couldn’t anymore.”

Susan told me Minx never liked going out — that she’d make a face about the stairs, preferring to stay on the couch. “She’s showing me that she doesn’t want to go down,” Susan said, laughing. “She’s like, Ugh, such a bother. But she’d do it for you.”

When the call ended, I sat in my Berlin apartment. The city outside was loud — people smoking on balconies, a siren somewhere on Schönhauser Allee, the usual chaos of everyone’s life continuing.

And I was happy about my version of Minx funeral.

Not flowers and speeches, but a Wi-Fi séance in sweatpants, talking to a woman across the Atlantic who somehow made me feel more connected to my lost ones.

I still feel Minx around — that smug, tender presence. The sigh before sleep, the quiet request for approval. The calm surveillance of a creature who always knew when my emotions shifted.

Maybe it’s grief. Maybe it’s superstition.

Or maybe it’s just love doing its last little performance — refusing to exit the stage.

Contact Susan Wagner: susanewagner83@gmail.com

By Amanda Sandström Beijer