The appeal is understandable. Imagine hearing your father’s laugh again or receiving advice in your late mother’s voice. Imagine seeing your spouse’s eyes smiling back at you, assuring you everything will be OK. Some call these creations “griefbots” or “deadbots,” names that sound almost comic. The ache behind them is anything but.

Grief does not merely want remembrance. It wants the person back. That is why this technology does more than create a new market. It exposes a hunger modern culture has never managed to satisfy: the hope that death does not end relationships.

The ethical questions are serious. Could these tools trap people in grief? Might companies exploit families when they are most vulnerable? Did the deceased consent to being digitally imitated?

But there is a deeper cultural contradiction. We are willing to spend money on simulations of the dead while treating evidence that we might actually survive death as beneath serious consideration. We should be at least as curious about the testimony as we are enthusiastic about the technology. A culture that prides itself on following the data should not decide in advance which conclusions evidence is permitted to support.

As a social scientist, I spent several years reviewing that evidence. The familiar features of near-death experiences are well known: peace, tunnels, brilliant light, a life review, and, indeed, reunion with deceased loved ones. They are intriguing but hardly decisive. Skeptics can reasonably invoke dreams, hallucinations, oxygen deprivation, medication, and cultural expectation.

The question, though, is not whether every NDE account is genuine. Surely some are not. The question is whether all can be explained away.

In one prospective cardiac arrest study, a survivor accurately described people, sounds, and actions during resuscitation, with researchers concluding that awareness occurred for several minutes after the heart stopped. Later studies have continued to collect reports of memories and perceptions during resuscitation, although what those reports mean remains disputed. And evidence of accompanying brain activity has not, by itself, proven that the brain produced the experience.

End-of-life visions add another layer. Hospice research has found that dying patients commonly report vivid dreams or visions, often involving deceased relatives who appear to welcome or reassure them. In some cases, the patient did not yet know that the relative had died. Such experiences do not prove an afterlife, but neither should they be waved away simply because they don’t fit a materialist account of the mind.

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No single story settles the matter. Taken together, however, these reports make it reasonable to ask whether death ends consciousness and permanently severs our relationships. At minimum, they should raise the threshold for declaring the case closed.

Whatever we might think of griefbots, they should remind us that seeing our loved ones again may be more than fantasy. Let’s not settle for simulated reunion when the deeper question is whether real reunion awaits, and if so, how we might find our way there.

Michael Zigarelli is a professor at Messiah University and the author of several books, most recently Evidence for Heaven: Near-Death Experiences and the Mounting Case for the Afterlife (Baker Books, 2026). You can reach him or access his work at MichaelZigarelli.com