Beware of ferrets

The end of my grandfather's life -- he died horribly, of blood poisoning, from a ferret bite -- cast a shadow backward over what had gone before . . .

William Maxwell, "The Man in the Moon,"
in Billie Dyer and Other Stories, page 44

Referencing grandfather's death parenthetically like that reminds me of Nabokov's great:

My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, . . .

Lolita, An excerpt