The grief of losing a beloved pet is just as hard as losing a family member, and when Lucy Ledgeway said her final goodbye to her 14-year-old dog, she found comfort when she looked at the clouds and saw Sunny’s face.
Sunny passed away in her father’s arms at their home after suffering a seizure on June 20, 2020. He was a Parson Russell terrier that Ledgeway, 19, and her family had rescued when she was a year old.
The York, England native said that Sunny was funny and loving, but she also had a lot of health issues, including diabetes, and vets had given her only 12 to 15 months to live.
Sunny had been taking insulin for 13 months before her health started declining, and Ledgeway said her family had a serious scare a couple of days before she passed.
Sunny began throwing up and was having trouble going to the bathroom, which made her family and veterinarians think she was going to have to be euthanized.
But Sunny managed to hold on and stay for one more day with her family. “She was in bed up until around 2 p.m., and then my brother got a bag of crisps out and started eating, and she started sniffing up,” Ledgeway said. “It gave us a bit of hope, like, ‘Oh, so she’ll be all right.’”
Sunny looked much brighter, and so the veterinarians decided not to put her down, but she died the following morning. Ledgeway was sad and told her boyfriend that she wanted to see a sign in the sky to prove Sunny was all right. So, she went outside, looked at the sky, and said she saw Sunny’s face in the clouds.
“I was in shock, really, in disbelief,” Ledgeway said. “The thing is, I was sad all day, and then as soon as I saw her, it just made me laugh. It made me giggle to myself, and it made me happy. And I think that happening has made it easier to grieve.”
She took a picture, sent it to her mom and dad, and shared it on Twitter. In no time, her post was liked more than 100,000 times and received a lot of positive messages.
Some people reacted skeptically to Ledgeway’s story and said that she had edited the image, but even though she felt sad because of their comments, she said she would still treasure the experience.
“I’m grateful that I’ve seen that with my own eyes,” she said, “and I know that it’s not fake.”