It is a gut-wrencher even if you don’t know from animals. She posted it on Denver Craigslist, under the community animals section, and titled it, “My Beloved Sweet Pea Passed Away.”
“I don’t know why I’m posting this,” she begins. “I think I just need to get this out of me before I scream and I can’t stop.”
It is a recounting of her taking Sweet Pea, a cocker-terrier mix, and Frostie, a white shepherd/red heeler mix, to Chatfield State Park and letting the two dogs splash in a pond on Friday, Aug. 21.
About three or four hours after returning home, Sweet Pea began scratching madly. The vet told her to give her water. She did. The scratching did not stop. By the next Monday, the dog would not eat and just lay on the bathroom floor.
A full course of medications and IV treatments later, Sweet Pea died on Aug. 27.
She washed every inch of her home with water and bleach to protect Frostie, “my final reason for living,” she called him.
“My heart is broken,” the posting ends, “and my beautiful pretty girl (she loved to be called that) is gone. I’m scared for my other dog, and I feel horribly, terribly guilty.”
I was maybe the 35th person to reply to Marilyn Vargas.
“I wanted to warn people of the pond at Chatfield,” the 58-year-old woman explained. “My vet said he could not definitively say it caused Sweet Pea’s death. But if my posting saves only one of 100 animals, it would be worth it.”
What is certain is Marilyn Vargas and her husband, Bernd Tunkl, adored Sweet Pea.
“Every night I kiss her picture,” she says. “Every night I ask Bernd, ‘Why are we crying? Is this ever going to stop?’ He just tells me, ‘I don’t know, Hon, I don’t know.’ “
They adopted both dogs as puppies from different shelters. Sweet Pea was 3 when she died. Frostie is 2 now.
“Sweet Pea was very healthy and active until that day at the pond,” Vargas said, “a little maniac we always called a comma because she would wag her tail so hard it bent her nearly in half.”
She literally wails when speaking of her lost dog and of her life now. A certified paralegal for 31 years, she lost her job in February. Bernd, a waiter, has been out of work since July.
They attempted to sell their large home in Littleton. It sat on the market for five months. They are now trying to lease it, the two of them planning to move in with her father in New York.
“I’m at a point where I can’t make a decision anymore,” Vargas said.
She received not a single negative comment on the posting, she said. Every post was kind, caring, sincere and compassionate.
In a follow-up posting on Friday, she wrote: “I wish all of you who love your pets as family and the precious beings that they are will look at them tonight and understand how lucky you are to have them in your lives.”
Frostie is doing well. All of his tests were negative, she said. A week ago, in the middle of another crying session, she and Bernd decided to take a drive out to a shelter.
“We needed some reason to smile again,” Marilyn Vargas said.
They came home with Houdini, a year-old pug/beagle mix — “a puggle,” she calls him. Today, he and Frostie are in love, she says.
“Houdini is working magic with us,” Vargas said, crying. “Sweet Pea, I know, would have wanted us to get him.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
