'Letter to Brigit' tells of Viggo Mortensen's melancholy drive in 2005 to deliver the frozen body of his fifteen-year-old mutt to a San Fernando Valley crematorium. After retrieving Brigit from the vet where she'd been put down, he headed north on the 405 with her bagged and sealed in blue plastic in the backseat. He was crying. Suddenly, the push and pull of rush-hour traffic forced him to jam on the brakes, sending Brigit hurtling to the floor. He eased the car to a stop on the shoulder and, for the first time, looked in the bag. 'We had taken your collar off,' he recalled in Letter to Brigit. 'I knew that Henry was wearing it wrapped twice around his wrist as a bracelet.' But this dog had a collar. This dog was not Brigit. 'It was sad. But it was funny.'
Sources
Esquire, March 2006
