Sometimes comfort shows up quietly.
Daniel Sievert and his golden retriever service dog, Cooper, have been visiting communities across the country, including several in Colorado. The pair, from California’s Central Coast, arrived in Colorado in April and have stopped on the Western Slope, in the Colorado Springs area and around the Denver metro.
Sievert said his own life-changing experiences led him to this work. More than 50 years ago, he was electrocuted and severely burned.
“I was all but dead after that experience,” he recalled. “And I remember in my hospital room, there were people that would come and sit silently, just like Cooper, sitting silently and just be a presence, without giving any advice. And they would say, after a while, ‘You’re going to get through this. There’s a new life and a new hope ahead.’”
More recently, Sievert has overcome bladder cancer. He said Cooper helped him through his health challenges and now offers a calming presence to strangers facing struggles of their own.
“His superpower is he has the keen ability to use his heart and mind to evaluate people,” Sievert said of Cooper. “I’d say seven out of 10 people are in tears after they have a meeting with Cooper, and it’s five minutes. It’s not like all day or half an hour. And they usually tell me that story of they lost somebody, or something happened, something’s going on right now. How are they going to get through it? And I just say, I breathe and I say, ‘There’s hope ahead.’”
Sievert started driving across the United States with his previous golden retriever service dogs, Jake and Emerson, in 2013. He said he felt called to go to Boston to help people traumatized by the Boston Marathon bombing.
In the years that followed, Sievert visited more than 60 communities recently hit by tragedy, including multiple stops in Colorado after events such as the 2015 Planned Parenthood shooting. He called those visits his “Golden Missions of America.”
This time, Sievert said he and Cooper are going where they feel called, as he senses anxiety and stress in people across the country. He said they are powered by “faith and fumes.”
“I’m bobbing and weaving throughout the United States and going where I feel an unction to be,” he explained. “The way people are driving, the way people are shopping: Hurry, hurry, hurry, worry, worry, worry.
“The inspiration that I have is that, unlike me not being heard sometimes, I want to be able to listen to people without any debate, without any judgment, without any religious view, without any partisan view, because I’m nonpartisan, because people have hearts, everybody needs to understand they’re loved and they’re cared for.”
Sievert and Cooper hope to visit 101 places in 101 days. He said the trip is being funded by donations from strangers.
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