or much of her life, Margarita Suarez fed and cared for stray dogs and cats in Merida Yucatan, Mexico.
"My mom has always been good with all animals and people," Suarez’s daughter, Patricia Urrutia,told ABC News. “Always fed the dogs on her block and the 20 stray cats that lived there.”
So it was appropriate, if not very surprising, that, at her funeral in Cuernavaca Morelos — about 830 miles away from her hometown — stray dogs came to pay their respects.
"When I was in a moment of so much pain these dogs that came, they showed me that everything was going to be okay," Urrutia told ABC News.
Perhaps most remarkable, the animals in attendance were not the same canines 71-year-old Suarez cared for over the years.
Urrutia posted photos of the dog-attended funeral on Facebook.
“I’ll share photos of the saddest day of my life, only because something marvellous happened that I want to share,” Urrutia wrote, according to a translation by BuzzFeed News. The photos quickly went viral and have since been shared more than 50,000 times.
"They stayed with my mother all day, and then at night they all stayed — but In the morning all the dogs vanished but one, but one hour before we brought my mom to be cremated the dogs came back and grouped around as if to say goodbye," Urrutia said. ”I swear by God that it was beautiful, marvellous.”
Urrutia added that the workers at the funeral home had never seen anything like it before. Dogs don’t usually hang around that area. “My brother-in-law asked if the animals were from the place and was told no, that they never had seen them before,” she told Norte Digital.
Dogs weren’t the only animals to attend Suarez’s funeral. A bird flew through a window in the early hours of the morning, singing as it flew past the coffin.
Photo credit: Patricia Urrutia Facebook page
