I agree that watching a pet die has got to be one of the saddest experiences you can go through (in part because you feel so darn helpless, here's this suffering creature that has depended on you for everything and there's nothing you can do to save or even really comfort them) though fortunately for me I've never had to actually had to view the moment of death. The closest times I've come to it have been when I was very young. The first was one of my family's cats that caught distemper and died over a tense few days, and then I remember seeing another cat of ours right before my parents took him to the vet to be put down (he'd been hit by a car and was paralyzed from the shoulders down, my parents thought it best he didn't suffer anymore) I think that one was the worst. With our last family cat I was spared that agonizing last look as my mother tactfully took him away while I was at school. But by far the most heart wrenching and painful death to go through was the loss of me and my daughter's cat, Siamesey. He was barely over a year old and he was hit by a car on a busy road near where we lived. He managed to get back to the trail he used as his private shortcut to and from our home, before he succumbed to his injuries and died. My daughter was on spring break and she went to look for him because he didn't come home after we had been out all night at my mother's for her birthday. She came running back from looking for him, crying and saying that she'd found him and she thought that he was dead. I went back out with her and sure enough, there he was laying on his side in the middle of his favorite trail not a drop of blood on him but I could tell. I screamed and went up to him but he was already stiffening. I cried and so did my daughter. We had to hold each other up going back to the house. People seeing us would have thought we just saw our best friend dead and we did. I thought he'd been poisoned because of the lack of apparent injury but an autopsy showed that he had been hit at a high speed and was completely broken inside. It took forever to get over and for the longest time I couldn't think about him without crying. To help my young daughter get through it, I told her that God recycled cat's souls and that one day he'd be returned to us. Sometimes I think he has been in little ways with a couple of the cats both my daughter, now grown, and I have had. The cat I have now certainly has all of his attitude and intuitiveness, and I'm sure if its not him, he'd approve of Hank anyway.
