While I was offshore for my first trip on my current ship – something that wasn’t going well anyway – Melisa had to deal with losing Blizzard on her own. It devastated her and there was nothing I could do to help. She knew something was wrong with Blizzard, and had taken her to the vet for tests, but when the end came it was sudden and in early hours of the morning Blizzard died.
I think it has been the only time that we have lost a dog when I was not there.
Blizzard was a white Border Collie that was deaf and mostly blind. Melisa and I had both found her, independently, on different pet adoption sites one time that I was offshore. Although we had talked about her, I didn’t know that Melisa had traveled over the mountians, in December, to the other side of the state to get her before I came home from that trip. Melisa picked me up at the airport and as she was pulling in to the pickup zone I saw the white dog in the car, but it was only as I got into the car and the dog came to look at me I realised, “wait a minute, that’s not Chloe!”.
Blizzard had been lost by her owners and turned into a shelter. I think she missed her family and it took a while before she really settled in with us, but she did, and became part of the Morrison clan. She bonded mostly with Domino, but she also liked playing with Rowan.
We don’t know for sure how old she was, the shelter guessed she was around two when we got her, but we had her for over nine years so she would have been at least 11.
