A 13-year-old dog has been grief-stricken since the sudden death of one of her owners and stopped eating until she got to say goodbye.
Sadie, the Border Collie/Dalmatian-shepherd mix, got that opportunity when she attended the funeral of Julia Beaulieu’s husband, who died from a sudden heart attack a few months ago.
A photo of Sadie and Julia at the casket reveals a tender and heartbreaking scene.
Beaulieu explained to Global News that Sadie was adopted into the family when she was just 8 weeks old and was as shocked as the rest of the family when her husband passed away. When people came to take his body away, Sadie tried to wake him.
“Once they stopped working around him, she came and she laid with him and pushed at his hand almost as if to get him to pet her,” Beaulieu said. “She was daddy’s girl — she was his and he was hers.”
Sadie was devastated afterwards, and would wait at the window of their home to see if her dad was coming home from work. She stopped eating for 10 days and lost weight. So when it came time for her husband’s memorial service, Beaulieu brought Sadie along, so the dog could say goodbye.
Beaulieu said that she hoped that Sadie seeing inside the coffin would maybe give her some sense of closure.
“I let her stand up and look [in the casket] and she had almost a look of shock on her face,” she told the Canadian broadcaster. “She stood there…and was quite puzzled by it and then she just seemed to relax and just stood there with me.”
The CEO of the funeral company snapped the photo and gave it to the family. Beaulieu said that seeing the photo gives her a “little comfort” and shared that Sadie began eating again after the funeral.
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