• By MARK H. HUNTER
• Special to The Advocate
• Published: Sep 6, 2009

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Stephen Valenti, a retired police officer, can be as gruff and tough as they come but when his beloved blue and tan, short-haired dachshund Smokey had to be euthanized last September, he said he and his wife, Gail, couldn’t stop crying for days at a time.

“We got Smokey when he was 19 months old, he went through Katrina with us, he went through the rebuild (of their destroyed Slidell home) with us, he lived in the trailer with us,” he said. “Quite honestly, when we lost him we were really devastated — it broke our hearts something horrible.”

Smokey was the third dachshund the Valentis had owned over the years, but the other two lived to be 14 and 16 years old when they had to be euthanized and that loss was not so difficult. Smokey was relatively young, only five years old, when he was stricken with lymphoma cancer.

“We had to put him in the (VCA Airline) hospital the last week and then we brought him home,” Gail Valenti said. “He would have been 6 in October and died on Sept. 24 last year.”

“Every morning when we got up, we’d start crying because we were missing him so much,” she said. “We were really grieving very, very hard. You would think we had lost a human member of our family.”

They were so sad they even hung a large black wreath on their front door for a month.

Smokey’s primary vet, John Kahn, of VCA Hospital in Metairie, referred them to Dr. Andrew Daters, an oncologist with Southeast Veterinary Specialists in Metairie, who also works one day a week at the LSU campus in Baton Rouge.

Daters referred them to Stephanie Johnson, Stephen Valenti said, because “we were in a really bad place, I tear up right now just thinking about it.”

They had to euthanize Smokey in September and talked to Johnson a few weeks later, an event that helped them tremendously, the couple said.

“We visited with her one time for about two hours and she was just wonderful,” Stephen Valenti said. “She got us over the hump — as it were.”

“She was wonderful,” Gail Valenti said. “She had dachshunds also and that helped.”

The couple now has a new dog, “Izzy,” a miniature ‘Isabella and tan’ dachshund, also called a ‘fawn and tan,’ which brings them much joy, they said. Their advice to folks grieving the loss of a pet is to talk to someone such as Johnson about it.

“What she did for us was a major part of our healing process,” Stephen Valenti said.