When she’s out kayaking alone, Dee Cooper-Rooney can yell out anything she wants. She lets out the anger from two abusive relationships.

She lost three full-term babies to her first husband’s abuse. Years later, a boyfriend left her for dead.

“I remember the ambulance driver telling the police officer, ‘At least give her the dignity of dying at home,’” Cooper-Rooney said during a recent interview. She couldn’t open her eyes and although her twin daughters were hiding in the next room, her jaw was so swollen she couldn’t tell the emergency crew where they were.

Knowing her daughters needed her gave her the strength to hang on.

That was a couple of decades ago. Cooper-Rooney, now happily married, lives in Wesley Chapel, Fla. She spends many hours on the water. Kayaking is easier than other forms of exercise on her left hip, injured in the abuse.

Cooper-Rooney was in Wiscasset recently as part of her work to spread the word that domestic violence can be survived and should be talked about. She plans to make that point in a much bigger way next year, when she will kayak from Florida to Wiscasset to raise money for Sunrise of Pasco County, a domestic violence and sexual assault center in Florida
This year she’s driving to locations along the East Coast and meeting with media and domestic violence prevention groups at various stops.

Following an afternoon paddle around the Sheepscot River’s Wiscasset shore on June 9, she sat down in a Water Street restaurant with three women who work to prevent domestic violence – one from the Department of Health and Human Services’ domestic violence and sexual assault prevention program, and two from New Hope for Women, a Rockland-based nonprofit that supports people in the Midcoast affected by domestic violence.

New Hope for Women’s Education Director Meg Klingelhofer was “delighted and honored” by Cooper’s announcement.

“Seeing her strength and her willingness to lend her voice…I know will help someone who is living in a state of terror and has never said anything to anyone about it,” Klingelhofer said. “They will see her being able to steer her own course, literally and figuratively.”

Tina Tucker, New Hope for Women’s community educator for Lincoln County, said nothing she could tell domestic violence victims could have the impact of Rooney’s story of survival and the example of liberation that her trip will be. “This is sort of the ultimate vision of freedom, what freedom looks like to her,” Tucker said.

Tucker asks people who have been abused what they would like their life to look like in a year, if it could be anything they wanted it to be. The exercise is an effort to get them to realize it can look like that, if they choose it for themselves.

Cooper-Rooney is setting an example of empowerment, said Holly Stover, the Department of Health and Human Services’ director for the prevention of domestic violence and sexual assault. She shared her idea to have a succession of groups join Cooper-Rooney for the Maine legs of her trip.

Cooper-Rooney figures the 1,500-mile trip – set to begin May 15, 2013, in North Peninsula State Park in Flagler Beach, Fla. – will take 50 to 60 days.
She trains about six hours a day, three or four days a week, on the water. She has practiced rolling her kayak, to get familiar with that experience. Cooper-Rooney has lost 100 pounds since a friend got her into kayaking more than two years ago.

The licensed massage therapist has been working toward a bachelor’s degree in natural medicine from Everglades University. She hopes the good things that have come into her life will show other people in situations like hers that they can have a future free from abuse.

“Even if you’re walking in hell now, it doesn’t mean your life has to end there,” she said.

For more information – or to watch updates next year as she paddles up the coast – visit The Sunshine Paddle website.

For more information on New Hope for Women, visit their website.