Chance came into our lives one day as a surprise, and a miracle! I am convinced to this day that G-d sent an angel to watch over us and that angel just happened to be a gorgeous Golden retriever that we named Chance!
     I have a daughter that is bipolar. She started having problems when her dad and I divorced when she was about 11-years-old. This was probably made worse by the fact that he remarried within a month of our divorce being final and she did not get along with her new stepmother at all. She stayed with her dad initially, but things got very bad and by her sophomore year of High School she had come to live with me. She was taking a Vet tech or canine science course that fall at her high school and has always loved animals. So any time she had a spare minute, you could find her in the class where they had the dogs helping to walk them or just spend time with them. The dogs seemed to reach something inside her no number of counselors could ever reach!
     One day in the fall, someone showed up with a Golden Retriever that someone had found wandering around the school with no collar or tags. They assumed he had gotten loose from the classroom so brought him there. My daughter was helping as usual that day and spent the afternoon getting acquainted with him. He ignored everyone else but would stick his paw out every time she came near the kennel, like he had come just for her and he knew that. Of course the school had to call the city to pick him up since he was a stray. The next day she dragged me to the pound and showed him to me. I was sure someone would come claim him! He looked to be about a year old, healthy and well kept, a beautiful shiny coat. Surely someone loved him and would come looking for him. I told her that if he was not claimed and was put up for adoption we could think about adopting him, but I worried that he would be claimed by his family and her heart would be broken! I did not want her to get her hopes up. We visited him every day and she asked every day if anyone had called for him yet. And every day we got the same answer. ”Not yet.”
The day finally came that they scheduled a date to have him neutered and set a date that he would be available for adoption. Being a pure bred Golden, I was sure there would be dozens of people lined up the day he was available and again did not know how we would be able to adopt him.
     But my daughter wanted him so badly that I drove to the pound and sat in my car in the parking lot from 2 AM until the door was unlocked the next morning to make sure I was the first one in line. And I was the first one there that next morning! We brought him home that day and named him Chance. But from the beginning we called him Chancy Dog. We don’t know where he came from but he was about a year old and already house trained. He never had an accident from the very first day and he attached himself to my daughter like a shadow. He loved everyone in the family, including the cats, who were not all that crazy about him to start with. But he had a special bond with Anna. He was her guardian angel from the beginning!
     I always knew when she was either getting manic or getting depressed! Chance would stick closer to her during the times she would swing out of the middle mood ranges. When she was doing fine, he’d find things to do, playing with our Boston terrier or the cats or playing with his toys. But when ever Anna needed him, he would abandon everything to watch over her. It is almost like G-d sent him to be her guardian angel and he knew that was his job.
     Everyone loved him and we spoiled him too much! He loved the sofa and would get up on it every chance he got. If someone would get up to go to the restroom during a movie, more often than not they would come back to find a golden retriever nestled comfortably in their spot! And at night, he’d wait for everyone to go to bed and then make himself comfortable! We’d get up in the morning to find him sprawled on the sofa on his back with all four legs sticking out at odd angles!
     He was a bit overweight. His downfall was that he loved people food, he would wait patiently for a handout or tidbit, he was never rude, never demanded a treat. Just sat there with those gorgeous brown eyes, patiently waiting for some tidbit to hit the floor or be tossed his way.
     One day he was very bad and ate most of a large pizza, we had gotten it from Sam’s and it was a very large three meat pizza. We left it on the counter for just a minute and that is all he needed! Chance loved pizza above all other foods! We spotted him coming out of the kitchen with a piece in his mouth and ran to take it from him. When we got to the kitchen, it seems that was the last piece and he had already polished off the rest of the pizza! Needless to say this ended up in a visit to the vet as he got very sick and pills for several days. It didn’t diminish his love for pizza in the least though. I think he rather thought being sick was a small price to pay for snagging an entire pizza! But we were much more careful after that. We put him in the back room any time we ordered pizza and didn’t let him out until the leftovers were safely stored in the fridge!
     We had probably had him for about a year when he saved Anna’s life. She had gone into a very bad depression and I knew he was worried about her because he was keeping so close to her. He would normally sleep on the sofa or the floor in my bedroom, but he had been shadowing Anna for several days so I knew he was in ‘guardian angel’ mode. One night after I had gone to bed, she took a huge number of pills. She had managed to stagger to the kitchen and collapsed on the floor there, but everyone was asleep so no one knew what had happened. Chance found her and alternated between watching over her and running to the bedroom trying to wake me up. He finally got me to go with him and brought me straight to her. We called 911 and got her to the hospital in time, barely! She was in intensive care for three days. We figured out later that he had found her about 45 minutes after she took the pills, so we were able to get help for her very quickly! However, if Chance had not gotten me up when he did, by the time I found her in the morning it would have been too late.
     She is doing much better now, it has been a couple of years and she seems to have turned a corner and for the first time I thinks she is going to be okay. I think maybe Chance knew that too and G-d needed him back. He was somewhat overweight, and I had noticed him breathing heavier the last week or so, but I just thought it was the weight. One morning Anna and her boyfriend decided to take him for a walk to the park, he had been there before and loved the park and it was only 15 minutes from our house. It was cool for Texas summer when she left the house and she had brought water bottles along to give him in case he got hot. At the park they let him sit in the shade and gave him lots of water before starting home. He collapsed about a block from our house on the way home. Some very nice ladies in a truck stopped and helped her get him into the truck and got him to the emergency animal hospital almost immediately after it happened. We told them to do anything they needed. They iced him down and started IVs and sedated him. During the night he was given plasma several times.
     The next morning he looked better. He seemed to recognize us and tried to wag his tail. The vet said he had tried to sit up and had eaten a little but had thrown it up. But we thought he was through the roughest part, we knew recovery would be slow but we thought, actually we hoped really, that he had turned a corner and was out of the woods finally. We were wrong. Later that morning we got a call from the animal hospital that his organs were shutting down and he would not last very long. They said that we needed to get there as quickly as we could. I knew we would not make back up there in time. On the drive there, I said out loud “Chance if you can hear me, we love you! If you need to go, it’s okay. We don’t want you to suffer or try to hang on until we get there if you will be in more pain. It’s okay Chance. We love you and we will never forget you!” We got to the hospital about 20 minutes after he passed away. Later I would put together where we were when I told him it was okay to go, and where the hospital was and as best I can figure he passed away right about the time I was telling him it was okay to go. They said that it was very peaceful. He just sighed and stopped breathing. It was very quick and he wasn’t in any pain at the end.
     We sat there with his body for a long time. None of us could bear to leave him but we had to go eventually. We made arrangements for a private cremation. I just got the call a few minutes ago that his ashes are ready to pick up. I have been crying for the last couple of days and I don’t know when I will be able to think about him without crying. I am sitting her with tears streaming down my face even as I write this. I think G-d sent us an angel in the form of this wonderful Golden to watch over Anna during her worst times and he knew that his job was done and she was going to be okay. I think he needed to go back to heaven. Maybe there is another child that is going to need him soon and he needed to go. All I know is we loved him and he loved us and took good care of us. It was an honor and a privilege to have known Chancy dog for the few years that we had him and we will never forget him!