After losing a 12 year old Golden Retriever (Blazer) to cancer, I was looking for a Golden Retriever again and while looking for puppies, came upon RAGOM on the internet, which in 2001 was quite different that it is today! I very much liked the idea of a rescue dog for our family, and we adopted Katie in the Spring of 2001 and she quickly became part of our life. We were told that Katie was from a family in Iowa who was in over their head with too many dogs. They had left behind  a note and it was clear that they also loved Katie very much.  Katie became Comet as there were family friends names Kate and Katie.    She was always eager to please as Golden's often are, she loved to run thru her obedience “tricks”, if Comet somehow wanted to be too much of a hostess. our friends were amazed at her willingness to “Kennel Up.”  We had several friends comment over the years at how well behaved she was, even friends that did not necessarily like dogs were amazed by her gentle friendly nature when she would be around them, and she won over many a new friend.

She loved camping, hiking and of course, swimming. She got to see a large part of Minnesota and the Dakotas as we traveled in the summers. When we started to load the camper she was right there waiting to be loaded into the kennel for the trip, she knew that the kennel meant something good was happening. Thunderstorms made her nervous, but as long as she had her people around everything was ok.  She was never a velcro dog, but she was always keeping an eye on her people, and she would always be nearby.  She loved to just hang out with us, with neighborhood friends out on their deck, and she was not one to stray too far away.   

She survived a couple of health scares, the 1st time she got into something at a lake that messed with her GI system, and later she had several tumors that were surgically removed two years ago.  Recently, she had several lumps develop in the last year or so, and in the last two months we think she had some sort of seizure or stroke, and she rapidly lost the strength in her back legs, and she had developed some sot of facial tick were she was twitching quite a bit.  Although she loved her kennel safe haven, and she knew we would always leave her alone when she was in it, she got stuck in it and we had to take apart to get her out, and she never wanted to go around it after that.   We tried Animal Chiropractic, as well as several kinds of pain medications, but she was unable to get her back legs to work reliably to go up and down stars, so we carried her up to our bedroom at night, and back down in the morning. She began to have a lost look in her eyes, like she was not really with it anymore. She lost interest in food and water, we enticed her with all sorts of the foods she loved, and she would lay down as if to say enough already. The last few days, she was having troubles walking straight and her legs were so weak that she could not squat to pee, and she was mortified to fall backwards into her own waste, and we all realized it was time.