Montgomery

When we decided to get dogs, we had a couple of rules. I wanted two, so they could keep each other company. I wanted boys. Mrs Schwartz wanted chocolate labs. She wanted to give them "old southern gentlemen" names.
She found the breeder and set the whole thing up. We went down to see them. Their grandfather had won the Westminster Dog Show. There were two boys in the litter. We took them immediately.

Chocolate labs have green eyes when they're puppies. Two fat, chocolate fuzzballs with jade-green eyes.
I named Zachary, and Mrs Schwartz named Montgomery. From then on, Zachary was "my dog" and Montgomery was "her dog".
While Zachary has droopy hound dog features, Montgomery had these big doe eyes. Montgomery was the happy-go-luckie spaz, even when he grew to 110 lbs. When he got excited, he would jump straight up in the air.

He always wanted to meet everybody, both dogs and people. When we went to the dog park, he would stay by the entrance and greet all the new dogs coming in. I've never seen him get angry or aggressive with anyone. He would wrestle with his brother all the time, so he got pretty good at it. One day, at the park, a woman insisted on bringing her obviously aggressive dog over to say hi, even though it was growling at us. Before I could stop her, she brought it over to Montgomery. Her dog lunged at him. As its jaws snapped on empty air. Montgomery slipped to the side like a professional boxer, and clawed the side of the other dog's face once. The dog jumped away, confused, scared, and pissed off. Monty never lost his happy, goofy look; he never growled or got angry.

I had hoped he would last until the weekend. Mrs Schwartz called me at work this morning to tell me he had taken a turn for the worse. We brought him to the vet. He was happy. He loved going there. There were plenty of new dogs and smells. We both petted him as he died.

We took him home and let his brother see him. We debated this for quite a while. We decided it was better that his brother see that he is dead, than look for him and wonder where he is.
Zachary came over and sniffed him a few times, then walked away. We think he knew it was coming more than we did. He's handled it a lot better than we thought he would. He went out to the front yard, sat down, and barked for a while at nothing.

I buried him in the backyard. He was a good boy.

UPDATE:

Thanks, everybody, for your kind words.