When planning your wedding, it’s important to delegate roles. Who will lead the yoga session? Who will officiate? Who will oversee the last minute makeup fixes? And most importantly: Who will struggle to carry the enormous dog down the aisle?
In the case of Kelly O’Connell’s wedding, the task of the dog fell to her maid of honor and sister, Katie Lloyd. But Charlie Bear wasn’t some lilliputian purse dog too bitchy to walk on his own. At the time of O’Connell’s nuptials to her husband, James Garvin, the dog was a 15-year-old, 80 pound black lab who in April was diagnosed with a brain tumor.
According to ABC, it was imperative to O’Connell and Garvin that Charlie attend the wedding, though during the ceremony it became clear that he was too sick to walk the short distance to his people on his own. So Lloyd—who is 5’3″— rolled up her maid of honor sleeves, scooped Charlie into her arms and hauled him down the aisle herself:
“Both of us just dropped to our knees and started crying,” bride Kelly O’Connell of Denver, Colorado, told ABC News today of her dog, Charlie. “To see him be carried a few feet, it kind of solidified for me that it’s not the Charlie he liked to be. He was aging, and it hit me knowing that he lost a lot.”
Lloyd, for her part, told the Daily Mail that she had no intention of leaving the dog behind.
‘The aisle was really short and I am just not a chick to be messed with.
‘People were telling me to just leave him because he obviously was like ‘Aunt Katie, I can’t.’
‘That’s when I yelled ‘I’m not leaving him!’ and picked him up and bolted. He is so big from all his steroid treatments.
Charlie Bear died just a few days after the ceremony, though his presence there will be forever memorialized in these amazing photos. May we all find someone who loves us enough to carry our giant dog down the aisle at our weddings .
Images via JenDz Photography/Facebook.
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