How a Little Maltese Named Piccolo Changed One Woman’s Understanding of Death
- 16 hours ago
- 10 min read
Veronica Kim connects the dots within the vast field of reality, guiding individuals to a powerful 40,000-foot macro view of their life’s purpose while offering intimate micro perspectives that reveal the intricate essence of who they truly are.
He flew in from Oklahoma in 2007. A tiny Maltese boy, all white fluff and enormous personality, the year my husband Brian and I made our union official with a small ceremony in Hawaii. We called him our son, and we meant it completely. What I didn't know then was that Piccolo had not arrived by accident. He had volunteered for this. He came with a mission, and he would spend seventeen years completing it before returning home.
Four days before his tumor surgery in early 2022, the three of us went for our usual walk around the apartment. Piccolo stopped on the path and sniffed at something on the lawn. I looked down expecting flower petals, the colors were so vivid, so saturated, magenta and green, but it was a hummingbird, dying or perhaps already gone. I had never seen one up close before, and I didn't know they were that small.
I felt an immediate urge to give it a proper burial. I found a box, asked a stranger passing by to watch over the little bird while I returned, and by the time I came back, it had been pushed to the curb. I buried it on the hiking path behind our apartment, by the Guadalupe River, and then looked up what a dying hummingbird means.
"Biggest change, transformation, and challenge. The universe is telling you that you are ready. I took it as preparation for Piccolo's surgery. I wasn't wrong, but I was only seeing one layer of it."
The surgery went well, and I wanted so badly to exhale, to simply enjoy having him back, but Piccolo wasn't eating the way he used to, and I couldn't let myself rest. His periodontal health became my new obsession. I researched for weeks until I found a chewing bone made from compressed vegetables that promised to clean his teeth gently and safely, and I gave it to him with the careful confidence of someone who had done their homework. What followed was our first emergency vet visit. The bone caused an obstruction and then a stricture in his esophagus that meant Piccolo could no longer eat solid food at all. From that point forward, I blended his meals into smoothies three times a day so he could lick rather than chew. I biohacked his nutrition, studied canine ketogenic principles, learned more about diet and the body, his and mine, than I had in the decades before. My dormant OCD had found its fullest expression, and it would not let go.
He was patient through all of it, trusting me completely in that wordless way that bypasses language entirely. In the thickness of those two years, you don't need words to understand a being who loves you unconditionally. You simply know.
What I understand now is this. Dogs absorb the emotional wounds of the humans they live with. The tumor that had grown around his liver was not random. It was metabolized grief, mine and Brian's, that Piccolo had taken into his own body so we didn't have to carry it alone. He was doing exactly what he came to do.
In February 2024, I flew to Korea to see my mother, to sit with her, speak to her, offer her my presence in the way only a body in the same room can, after two years of her lying in an Alzheimer's facility, bare flesh on a small frame, whispering constantly in a language I couldn't fully understand, as though she had already moved beyond the limits of physical language into something that precedes words entirely. I sat with her and told her it was time to go home. My sister and niece wept. I knew then, though I couldn't name it yet, that my sister's grief had found a place to root itself so deeply it would eventually follow her down.
I came back to Piccolo with suitcases full of tiny Korean shirts, jackets, and blankets I had bought in a shopping frenzy, and he wore them all and posed like a professional model so I could photograph him, as if the bare minimum he could offer me, after everything, was his vanity and his grace. He knew. Of course, he knew.
In the second week of March 2024, the storms began. Three, four nights in a row, the moment the sun set, the weather turned, something ancient in the air, something the body registers before the mind catches up. Piccolo was struggling to breathe, struggling with basic functions, barely eating or drinking. I was channeling daily by then, asking with everything I had, "Is he going to be okay? Will he fight this? The answer came back each time with a clarity that left no room for doubt. Yes. On Monday, March 11th, the message sharpened into something specific. He will fight this and come back good by Friday. I held onto that with both hands.
We took him to the vet on Thursday for IV fluids and X-rays. His doctor, Dr. Patrick, looked at him with the kind of tenderness that told me everything without saying anything, and his last words to my boy were, "Piccolo, you handsome boy, aren't you so amazing." That night, something shifted. Piccolo could go to the bathroom normally for the first time in weeks, and he slept beside me as the storm returned, a branch that had no business near my window scratching against the glass all night. I thought of O. Henry's The Last Leaf, the old painter who drew a leaf in the storm so the dying girl next door would believe it hadn't fallen yet. I thought Piccolo is fighting through one more night. Tomorrow is Friday. He will come back.
Friday morning arrived the way only the best and worst days do, sun blazing, sky clear, the storm dissolved as if it had never existed. Around 11 a.m., I drew him a warm bath, dried him gently, and settled him onto his favorite donut-shaped bed on top of our bed. I sprayed mist on his face to keep him moist, and though his breathing was still shallow and labored, I cheered him on. You've got this. You will win this.
At 11:20, Piccolo stood up. I was elated. I grabbed him and cheered louder, and he looked at me, steady and clear, holding my gaze for a few brief seconds before sighing and dropping his head. I didn't understand immediately. Then I felt it, the sensation of him leaving his body. I screamed. I held him and screamed. I felt his heartbeat slowing under my hands.
We had always told him, when it's time, you go on your own. But you'll go in our arms. He kept that promise. Brian had walked out the door minutes earlier to pick up a meat order for Piccolo I had placed weeks ago, and he told me later that he knew, the very moment he stepped outside, that he would never see Piccolo alive again. Piccolo had arranged that window deliberately. The last moments needed to be just the two of us. He had something to show me, and he needed me alone to show it.
I was standing at the mirror, holding his small body, when I heard it, a little boy's voice, clear and excited and almost breathless.
"Mom. Mom! It's me. It's Piccolo. Mom, I'm flying. I am flying. Whooo hooo! You have no idea how this feels!"
I said his name out loud, and the voice got clearer. "Yes, Mom. It's me." I cried harder, not to suppress what I was hearing, but to test it, to make sure I wasn't hallucinating, and the voice didn't waver. It became more present, more vivid, more distinctly him than anything I had experienced in seventeen years of physical companionship.
That was my first time witnessing death up close, not as an ending, not as a loss in the ordinary sense, but as a departure, as pure, ecstatic liberation. Standing there with his body in my arms, what rose in me beneath and alongside the grief was something I can only describe as reverence, a desire to salute, to honor, to bow to whatever had just happened in that room.
We drove the same road we had traveled a thousand times, past Oliver's Market where I bought the finest ingredients for his meals, toward the vet we knew by heart, now without a small white face pressed joyfully out the window. On the left side of the road, on a large lawn in front of a small building we had somehow never once registered in all those trips, there was a gathering, dozens of people, flowers, a quiet ceremony. Piccolo's voice came immediately. "Woo, I like that. That is for me, Mom. They are celebrating my death. Very nice. Very nice."
I told Brian, "He says that's for him." We looked at each other. A funeral parlor, right there on our road, all along, invisible to us until the day we needed it to be seen.
As we pulled into the vet parking lot, I noticed a tiny bumblebee crawling around Piccolo's closed eye. Brian shook it gently, and it flew away. When we walked out after leaving his body, the bumblebee was dead on the ground in front of our car, and Piccolo said, "Mom. It's called physical death. That body you just left in there, that is not me. I am right here. I am more alive than ever before. Please stop crying over that body. It was a transition I had to go through to get here. Do not attach to the physical."
That night, Brian drove out because he couldn't stand the silence of the house. Within minutes, he texted me a photo, the car in front of him at a stoplight, license plate reading MALTS MOM, a Maltese sticker in the rear window.
The following morning, sun streaming in, I heard the familiar voice. "Mom. Look out the window. Do you see me?" On the tallest branch just outside the glass, a tiny hummingbird sat completely still, facing the light, for five full minutes. The dying hummingbird from four days before Piccolo's surgery, now alive, now returned, the circle completed.
"Remember the hummingbird, Mom? I thought you'd recognize it right away. I'll be visiting you through this bird from time to time, to ease your attachment to the physical body."
That day was March 15, 2024. Nine years earlier to the day, on March 15, 2015, I had taken one of my favorite photographs of Piccolo, a haunting look on his face, something ancient behind his eyes that I didn't have words for then. I have words for it now. He already knew.
Later, a channeled message gave me language for what I had already felt in my body. Piccolo volunteered to come here as a dog specifically to find me. His soul origin, like mine, traces back to Andromeda. He chose the small, short life, the fur, the four legs, the unconditional love as the delivery vehicle, because it was the most direct path to my heart, and because he knew exactly what I would need to learn before the harder initiations came.
He was my first teacher of death. My first proof that consciousness survives the body. My first living demonstration that love doesn't end, it simply changes the channel.
My mother had a Maltese too, a tiny female named Jerry, who came into her life and stayed for eighteen years. My mother was once hospitalized for depression, not long after I left Korea to find my own path in America, and through that darkness and every emotional battle that followed, Jerry was there, a constant and devoted presence absorbing what my mother couldn't metabolize alone. When Jerry finally left, about five years before my mother's mind began to deteriorate, my mother's heart broke in a way it never fully recovered from. I believe, in the deepest part of me, that when Jerry left, something essential in my mother's will to remain began to quietly loosen. Two Malteses. Two women. Two soul contracts fulfilled with absolute devotion, each one holding her human steady for exactly as long as she was needed.
These animals are not pets in the way we use that word, as though they are accessories to our human story, as though we chose them. They are emissaries. They are soul volunteers who agree, somewhere before physical life begins, to compress their vast consciousness into a small body so they can find us, stay close, absorb what we cannot yet hold alone, and teach us, at the exact right moment, what we most need to know.
Piccolo taught me that grief is sacred, that the body is a vessel and not the being, that communication doesn't require physical form, and that when someone you love departs, the most important question is not where they go, but can you hear them now? He taught me that the bond cannot be broken. Not by time. Not by dimension. Not by death.
At the Monroe Institute's Exploration 27 training, during my second visit to Focus Level 34/35, I was able to reach all three of the souls I carry closest, my mother, my sister, and Piccolo. And it was Piccolo who delivered the message I least expected.
"Mom," he said, "you are 3D. Remember what you are made of." I reacted the way any consciousness-expanding human would. "I'm 3D? Eww. I want to be beyond that." He laughed. "No, not that 3D. You are the expression of dedication, devotion, and discipline."
I went quiet. Because he was right, and because I recognized it not just as a description of me, but as a mirror of him. Seventeen years of showing up, absorbing, staying, teaching, and loving without condition. If those three words describe me, they describe exactly what he came here to model.
The 3D everyone is trying to escape is not the same 3D Piccolo was pointing toward. When I first began my Monroe Institute training and heard the foundational teaching spoken aloud for the first time, something in me went completely still:
"I am more than my body. I am more than my physical self."
It didn't land as new information. It landed as recognition, as if some part of me had been holding this truth for a long time, waiting for the right container. In that stillness, I knew exactly where I had first received it, in a parking lot, on a sunny Friday morning in March, from a small white dog who looked at me one last time, sighed, and immediately started laughing with delight at how it felt to fly.
Piccolo, my son. My teacher. My Andromedan family. The ripple continues.
Read more from Veronica Kim
Veronica Kim, Certified QHHT® Level 2 Practitioner and Harmonic Egg® Guardian
Veronica is a QHHT® Level 2 Practitioner and Harmonic Egg® Guardian who guides individuals toward profound self-discovery and healing through Quantum Healing Hypnosis and sacred sound-light energy sessions. Her journey spans continents, from a childhood fascination with the supernatural in Korea to immigrating to America, where serendipitous paths led from teaching English to thriving in Silicon Valley's innovative tech world, reigniting early scientific dreams as tools for growth and stability. Through deep self-observation, she embraced her true purpose, helping others release blocks, access Higher Wisdom, and step into mastery of their intricate soul stories.
