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Agree re. Perspective defenitly. My wife thinks im cold hearted when it comes to deathā¦experinced a tough family death in my early 20s and since then ive been like this.
The vets coming to the in-laws house to put him to sleep, so he will be at home which i think is nice.
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I think I feel quite similar. I knew it was coming, and the day he died was awful, and the next day was probably worse as I cleaned up the house and kept finding half eaten dog chews. After that, it sort of settles down to a new reality. The house does feel quieter, but in a good way as we donāt get the occasional yelps of pain as he was trying to stand up.
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I read somewhere about how we grieve our pets whilst they are alive, and think that is true. A very different bond with our pets.
Our dogās 6 now (and my first dog). Dread the day, but hoping thats all a long while off
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Yes. Exactly. They are not people, they donāt think abstract but live in the moment. They are not meant to endure pain for our selfish sentiments.
If the hound is suffering and there is no hope for improvement, only detoriation; then itās the humane thing to do even if itās incredibly painful.
But it still hurts. We kept ours a bit too long simply because it is as you know, difficult to do and of course, even a dog in pain, can have āhappy momentsā and has. But stillā¦
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But honestly, I spent several years getting over my dog, if I am honest. Still think about him often. Maybe I should get a new one, but that dog became part of the family when I was 14 and he was mine when I grew up. Now when I live alone (my girlfriend has yet to move in, but I am trying to āworkā on that 
) , I have a cat which i love dearly. Easier of course, but it wouldnāt be the same dog if I got another one now that I am an adult man in my 40s. And then I have moved around, lived places where itās not easy to keep a dog. But perhaps thatās things I tell myself, I donāt know.
I am going to have a dog sooner or later again though. But for now, itās a cat only.
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I donāt care how hard hearted one might think they areā¦ When the needle is being applied to your faithful stick retrieving, tail wagging companion of several yearsā¦ and the last look of this world for them, is when they lock eyes with yours, and whether telepathically or just through the unbreakable bond that had formed between you, thoughts immediately pop into your head. Thoughts that seem to relay their last message/sā¦ of thank you for taking care of me, thank you for making me part of the family, thank you for keeping me warm and snugā¦ thank you for giving me a good lifeā¦!
Then their eyes close for the last time and they slip away in secondsā¦ It is about at this point, the tears start to flowā¦!
Losing a pet that has become āyour palāā¦ is one of the saddest times of your lifeā¦
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Saw the northern lights when camping in New Hampshire, years ago. Spectacular.
In October I saw them for the first time in our back garden right here in Indiana. Mostly green and various shades of pink. Not nearly as impressive as the great images weāve seen from Magnus, but a surreal experience to see them on your own doorstep, literally.
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We even saw them where we are in Germany last year which is on a similar latitude to Birmingham (UK). When we lived in Scotland you could see them a few times a year, but you had to be away from the cities. The light pollution in Central Scotland is pretty bad.
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I believe they were even visible in London last year. In Hackney.
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The amount of ground-source light is key, they are not that intense and it does not take much to drown them out.
The current generation of cellphone cameras is phenomenal at picking out lower levels of light. I took some photos of the sky at the lake this past summer a couple of hours after sunset, and was stunned to see the aurora in them along with the very last sunlight of the day. To the naked eye, it was really just a dark night.
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In Singapore I can only see Areola Borealis
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We saw a great display from our garden.
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You stick to drawing seagulls and horses 
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We lost ours in September.
Iāve never been so upset over a human.
It crushed me
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This is so true, @rupzzz. I have an Aussie shepherd retriever mix. We used to have a chocolate lab and my wife wanted another dog. I didnāt because itās a ton of work. But I couldnāt talk my wife out of it and this Aussie and my wife were inseparable. I began calling the Aussie my step dog. This dog did not leave my wifeās side for three years as my wife underwent chemo. Unfortunately my wife passed away and now the Aussie is my constant companion and shadow. Sheās the sweetest canine companion and I couldnāt me more grateful. As a Buddhist, Iām supposed to not think ahead and worry about impermanence but I do.
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itās pretty hard not to. You read this yet? Hardest book Iāve ever attempted.
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I have 
. I struggled with it and a lot went over my head. I then read Pema Chodronās How We Live is How We Die and suddenly the bardos made sense. Itās interesting how simple and complex the teachings can be. My mind is a mess though as youāve guessed by now 
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I had a guide on Fraser Island who was a hobbyist anthropologist and he explained it to me like this:
The teachings of the book is for the subconscious mind, not the conscious one. Your job is to read the book, not to understand it. When it comes time for your subconscious to pull from that information it will be there. The script was not written for a western mind, making it more difficult for us to try and understand it.
I re-read this section so many times:
We could say that the real world is that in which we experience pleasure and pain, good and bad. There is some act of intelligence which provides the criteria of things as they are, a basic dualistic notion. But if we are completely in touch with these dualistic feelings, that absolute experience of duality is itself the experience of non-duality. Then there is no problem at all, because duality is seen from a perfectly open and clear point of view in which there is no conflict; there is a tremendous encompassing vision of oneness. Conflict arises because duality is not seen as it is at all. It is seen only in a biased way, a very clumsy way. In fact, we do not perceive anything properly, and we begin to wonder whether such things as myself and my projections really exist. So when we talk about the dualistic world as confusion, that confusion is not the complete dualistic world, but only half-hearted, and this causes tremendous dissatisfaction and uncertainty; it builds up to the point of fear of becoming insane, the point where there are possibilities of leaving the world of duality and going into a sort of woolly, fuzzy emptiness, which is the world of the dead, the graveyard that exists in the midst of fog.
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This was my guide, Dave. He didnāt wear shoes, even when driving the bus. The first person to explain the importance of grounding and I wouldnāt have finished the book without him.
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