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Learning to say goodbye
Published February 25, 2006
By Jason Lawrence
Times News Editor
•••
Photo by John Schmid
Times Photo Editor
Dorothy Durkee calls it a life lesson: Never underestimate who I am or what I can do. I am old. Not dead.
It’s a lesson the Hunt resident says she learned watching Cooper, her 15-year-old Cavalier King Charles spaniel, as his health took a turn for the worse.
While most dogs of the breed are “lucky” to make it to 10 years, Durkee said, she still had difficulty facing the fact that his health and vigor were fading.
“I needed somewhere to put those very difficult feelings about facing the death of a dog who had been with me longer than I’d ever been married,” she said.
So Durkee, a tech-savvy senior citizen and self-professed “nerd in the woods,” turned to the Internet to cope with the emotions of a declining pet.
Last November, she began a Web log, or blog, to document the day-to-day status of Cooper’s health, as well as her roller coaster of feelings.
“I would see him fight it and conquer it,” she said.
“At some point, I realized he wasn’t dead. He was just old. There’s a big difference between being old and being dead.”
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“Sometimes I watch him struggle to do something that was once so easy for him and think, ‘This is The Time; we should put him down.’ But then he perks up again, gets excited over something interesting, comes looking for a meal, and I think, ‘No, this is not The Time.’”
— Posted Nov. 19, 2005
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The blog would become Dorothy’s catharsis, her way of dealing with a vigorous pet who had began to decline.
“The blog helped me get out there, get my feelings out, to provide a forum for people to rescue me, to say, ‘I’ve got an old dog, too,’ and talk about the feelings and special care that old dogs require.”
Dorothy says she wanted to provide a resource for others facing the same decision.
“If you’re facing it, you can search all over the Internet, or you can find somebody who has been through it and say, ‘What is it like?’” she said. “Some people have never put a dog down.
“When is the right time? How do you know how soon is too soon?,” she continued. “When do you reach the point that you’re doing it for yourself and not the dog?”
They were questions she would keep asking herself.
As Cooper’s condition seemed to deteriorate, at times, she would see glimpses of the once-vital dog.
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“For months I have been living in a small, quiet, relentless gloom, certain that Cooper was dying. But now I have a sense that this isn’t so, not yet. Cooper is living, living with old age and arthritis and near-blindness and a late-onset heart murmur, as well as whatever degree of heart disease one sees in elders of his breed. But there is no question that he’s alive.”
— Posted Nov. 21, 2005
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Despite his health maladies, Cooper still responded to his favorite treats. He turned 15 on Dec. 19, a day Dorothy wrote that she thought she would never see. She wrote that she no longer woke in the night to see if Cooper was still breathing. But little more than a month later, she wrote:
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“Sometimes it appears that Cooper is in decline, and I worry about whether I am keeping him alive for his benefit or mine. It’s a struggle to try to determine what’s the best thing for him: to just let him age, caring for him as best we can, or to take some initiative to speed things along. All I know is that he wakes every morning happy to see the world, pleased with his breakfast, and ready to take on the tasks of the day, even if those tasks include little beyond sleeping, eating, and allowing his belly to be rubbed.”
— Posted Dec. 24, 2005
A trip to Germany for the birth of her newest grandchild earlier this month meant that Dorothy and her husband, John, had to leave Cooper, and his 13-year-old half-sister, Tessie, at a kennel. The trip lasted longer than planned and when they returned, Cooper’s health had worsened.
The decision to put him down was made.
“As Cooper was passing, my husband John and I were looking for, and seeing, different things. What John saw was a stouthearted little soldier dying with dignity, even raising his paw to the vet as he was about to receive the injection. This was not a cheap, cutesy, anyone-can-do-it “gimme-your-paw” trick, something that Cooper never did; John saw it as the eloquent gesture of a brave fellow who had come to understand that his work here was done, or that if it were not done, it would be taken on by someone else.”
-- Posted Feb.21
Dorothy says she plans to continue her blog, even though Cooper is gone.
“The blog was mostly about Cooper, but we have a 13-year-old, Tessie, so we knew it would be about her, too,” she said.
Tessie suffers from seizures and could have a neurological problem other dogs of the same breed do.
“I got dozens and dozens of messages from people who were following the blog and either want to send condolences or tell their story,” she said.
One woman, also owns a Cavalier King Charles spaniel and attends the same church Dorothy does, sent a condolence note. The day before, she had just buried her sister.
“That kind of compassion and that kind of humanity is what I want to share,” Dorothy said.
Durkee’s online blog site is at http://elderdogs.blogspot.com/
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