When a mailman and a senior dog developed quite a bond, her owners wrote the mailman a heartfelt note letting him know that she had passed away.
“Gretchen passed away yesterday. She asked me to ask you if you would share her treats that she never got to finish with the other dogs on your route,” the note, penned by Chris Cimino, read. “She always enjoyed seeing you come to the door and was always happy to get a snack from you.”
My dad is a mailman and he likes to give dogs on his route treats. Today he told us one of the dogs on his route passed away and his owners gave him this bag of treats with this note 😠pic.twitter.com/JA46PU60a4
— eyelean (@amorningsting) April 1, 2019
Cimino adopted their dog, Gretchen, in 2013, and from the start, she was a little stand-offish and hesitant to trust anyone in the family. Still, Gretchen grew a friendship with the mailman, Fernando Barboza, who would bring her treats every day.
Even if he didn’t have anything to deliver to her house, he would still swing by and give her a hello. This went on for years until Gretchen passed after a long battle with a neuropathic disease.
Cimino said he couldn’t bear to tell Barboza in person, so he decided to leave the note with the treats to let their mailman know what had happened. Cimino’s daughter posted the heartfelt note on Twitter, and there, it received more than 873,000 likes and engagements.
If there’s one thing he hopes people take away from the story, however, it’s to “tell people to go adopt older dogs.”