I lost a great many people, two-legged and four-legged, in the past couple of years, and I don't know if grief ever fully goes away. I tend to think now that it stays, however faint, and becomes part of us.

Like you, I don't really believe in an afterlife. Unlike you, I do get occasional "visitations" from dead relatives and (more rarely) pets. But if anything, these occurrences only confirm my conviction that, as you wrote, the dead need to stay dead. Not because this crossing back into our world is spooky, but because they don’t belong here anymore. Just like we don't belong in the underworld yet.