IN MEMORIAM

Dorothy ‘Dot’ Smith, 79;

Ran Spurbeck’s For 20 Years

COOPERSTOWN –  Dorothy Marie Vidosić Smith, 79, an accomplished painter and the matriarch of Spurbeck’s Grocery for 20 years, passed from this life on Saturday, Sept. 29.

She was born in Atlanta, Ga. on May 5, 1939, the daughter of Joseph Paul Vidosić and Martha Marie Van den Bulck. She attended Georgia Tech and graduated in 1961. On June 16, 1961, she married Roger Smith, and in 1963, they moved to Toddsville.

In 1996, she and Roger took over Spurbeck’s Grocery, which Roger’s grandfather had opened in 1941, from Roger’s mother, Gert. They ran the store until they sold it in October 2017.

She was an accomplished painter and a member of the Leatherstocking Brush and Palette Club, and many of her paintings are enjoyed in homes throughout the area.

Dorothy would like you to read and consider the following excerpt from “The Lives of a Cell” by Lewis Thomas, in 1974: “In our way, we conform as best we can to the rest of nature. The obituary pages tell us of the news that we are dying away, while announcements in finer print, off at the side of the page, inform us of our replacements, but we get no grasp from this of the enormity of scale. There are 3 billion of us on earth, and all 3 billion must be dead, on a schedule, within this lifetime. The vast mortality, involving something over 50 million of us each year, takes place in relative secrecy. We can only really know of the deaths in our households, or among our friends. These, detached in our minds from all the rest, we take to be unnatural events, anomalies, outrages. We speak of our own dead in low voices; struck down, we say, as though visible death can only occur for cause, by disease or violence, avoidably. We send off for flowers, grieve, make ceremonies, scatter bones, unaware of the rest of the 3 billion on the same schedule. All of that immense mass of flesh and bone and consciousness will disappear by absorption into the earth, without recognition by the transient survivors. Less than half a century from now, our replacements will have more than doubled the numbers. It is hard to see how we can continue to keep the secret, with such multitudes doing the dying. We will have to give up the notion that death is catastrophe, or detestable, or avoidable, or even strange. We will need to learn more about the cycling of life in the rest of the system, and about our connection to the process. Everything that comes alive seems to be in trade for something that dies, cell for cell. There might be some comfort in the recognition of synchrony, in the formation that we all go down together, in the best of company.”

She is survived by her husband, Roger Colton; her brother, Richard Paul; children, Laura Marie, Steven Colton, Randall Charles, and Martin Paul; grandchildren Danette Lynn, Ariel Kadince, Donovan Walker, Stacey Richelle, Sidney Marie, Colton Dean Anthony, Amiya Toral, and Rowan Koel; and great-grandchildren Kasen Smith, Liam Eric, and Finnley Isla.

According to the deceased’s wishes, there will be no calling hours or service.

In lieu of flowers, please make contributions to the Otsego Land Trust (PO Box 173, Cooperstown, NY 13326) or to the Catskill Area Hospice (297 River Street Service Road, Oneonta NY 13820).

Arrangements are entrusted to the Tillapaugh Funeral Service, Cooperstown