Hotmail‘Dewey’ chronicles life of author, cat and town
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Two of Dewey's best friends were homeless men who would stop by the library.
“They never spoke to us but they would pick up Dewey and talk to him for 20 minutes. I don't know what they said. It didn't seem to matter, but it made them feel better,” she says. “He also seemed to know who needed him more than others.”
Dewey also seemed to know when Myron needed a break.
Whether it was interrupting her studies with a game of hide-and-seek or brushing his thick orange fur against her leg when she was deep in library work, Dewey knew how to ease her mind.
Myron says her book is a story of unconditional love, companionship and pulling yourself up by the bootstraps during tough times.
“Hopefully, it's a message of hope for people because the economic times now are very similar,” she says.
Eliot Finkelstein, instruction coordinator at the College Library at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said animal books are the "new breed" of self-help books.
“With all the bad news surrounding us in the world these days, people want a book that will make them feel good and more positive about life, and pets are the natural antidepressant in our very stressful world,” said Finkelstein, who also buys popular books for the library. “People want a new type of book that will make them feel better about life, and what makes us feel better than our pets?”
His spirit lives on
Dewey died on Nov. 29, 2006, at age 19. Since then, the library has received more than 100 offers for a new Dewey, but the library board decided to wait at least two years before deciding whether to get another cat, says Myron, who retired at the end of last year.
She recalls how Dewey's health began to fail in the year before he died and how, to help him put on weight, she would feed him cheese, scrambled eggs and roast beef sandwiches. “And he loved it!”
On the day Dewey died, Myron was about to leave for a trip to Florida when she got a call from the library staff telling her Dewey wasn't acting right.
“He was fine when I left, or I thought he was, but when I went back down there I could see he was in pain,” Myron says. An X-ray at a local vet showed he had a large stomach tumor. She stayed with Dewey as he was put to sleep.
“It was heart-wrenching,” Myron remembers. “I called all the staff and they came out to say goodbye, but it was one of the most difficult things I have ever done, but I knew I had to do it because he was suffering and I'd never let him be in pain.”
His ashes were buried in the lawn outside the library. A granite marker was placed at the site.
Myron believes his legacy will live on in a possible movie deal and in the stories people share about him — stories like the one from a woman whom Myron met during a book-signing in Sioux City.
The woman's mother lived in Spencer and would visit Dewey, but after suffering the effects of Alzheimer's disease, she moved to a care center in Sioux City. Her memory failed and soon she could only remember her daughter's name — and Dewey's.
The woman would bring her own cat, which looked nothing like Dewey, to visit her mother.
“And every time she walked in, her mother would say, 'Oh, thank goodness you brought Dewey with you,'” Myron says. “Until the day she died, the only two names she could say were her daughter's and Dewey's.
“It shows the impact Dewey had on people's lives,” says Myron, who hopes to begin publishing a series of children's books about Dewey in the next couple of years. “As I say in the book, Dewey changed lives one lap at a time.”
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