It was a rare breed of friendship.
The tale of a once-standoffish elderly rescue dog who struck up an unlikely friendship with a treats-hauling mailman before she died has gone viral, thanks to a tear-jerking tweet.
Gretchen, a sweet-but-shy German shepherd, and her Texas owner, Chris Cimino, left the mailman who visited her every day on his route a heartbreaking goodbye letter.
“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,” Cimino wrote in a letter with a bag of bone-shaped treats stapled to it. “She always enjoyed seeing you come to the door and was always happy to get a snack from you.”
The note, which was posted on Twitter by mailman Fernando Barboza’s daughter, had garnered more than 874,000 likes by Monday.
Cimino adopted Gretchen in 2013, back when she was skittish and nervous around people, he told ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
“Her mistrust of just about everyone outside of the family was pretty evident,” Cimino said. But she eventually warmed up to Barboza, who brought her treats every day.
“It started off slow,” Cimino said of their friendship. “But he was pretty persistent — he would call her name and she started looking forward to it.”
“Even when he didn’t have any packages to deliver to the door he would drive by and say, ‘Hey, Gretchen,'” Cimino said.
Eventually, the dog began waiting by the door for him.
“She started looking forward to him coming by,” Cimino said. “He would deliver a package to the old man across the street and she would get really jealous.”
The pooch passed away after a long battle with neuropathic disease last week, according to GMA.
Cimino now hopes his story will inspire animal lovers to adopt old dogs.
“You never know when you’re going to find that one-in-a-lifetime friendship,” he said.
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