Touched by an Angel

By Michael Shaffer 

If you are thinking of that old TV show by the same name in which Roma Downey and the incomparable Della Reese traveled the world as angels in a pink Cadillac, I have a much better story to tell. It all starts with a familiar story for Betsy and me.

We weren’t really looking for another dog. But then, we rarely are. They just seem to find us. The right dog. The right time. A good fit with our other rescues. Maybe one with special medical needs. Maybe not. Older, generally. It just seems to fit with us to take the older ones, especially after hearing their stories. 

I can’t remember who contacted us about Angel, although I am pretty sure it was Tim, but Betsy and I were “rescuiescent”? Before you try looking that word up, you will not find it in a dictionary, but Claude AI created the word with my assistance.  It blends “rescue” + “acquiescent” (accepting, yielding) + “quiescent” (quiet, at rest).

What I am trying to say, I think, is that we had reached kind of an equilibrium after loss and had acquiesced to our current situation not from indifference but from experience. There’s still that ember of curiosity when approached—you’re not closed off—but there’s a knowing hesitation born from understanding what opening your heart again actually costs.

You see, we are not newcomers to the rescue scene. We have loved and lost Lucy (black and tan coonhound mix), Annie (American English coonhound), Sarge (a BBB – Big Beautiful Bloodhound), Sadie (Treeing Walker coonhound), Pappy (chocolate Lab also known as Marley), and Sora (another chocolate Lab who was blind when we got her). Each one touched our hearts in different ways. At the time CILRA approached us about Angel, we still had Lucy and Mercedes (a bluetick coonhound whom we still have.)

If you have worked with Tim, you probably know that not only does he do his homework with specific dogs, but he is also really good at reading people. In other words, the universe aligned, Tim called, and it was not long until we, too, had been touched by not just any angel, but Angel herself – a now-eight-year-old yellow Lab with a heart of gold. 

I have to admit that when we met Angel, and saw her interactions with Tim, I really did not think Angel would ever accept anyone else as her “person” except for Tim. Wow, was I surprised! Literally almost the second that we were separated from Tim, Angel latched on to me, as if I had always been in her life forever.  

This was the beginning of an amazing friendship, that I had only known once before with a dog. My wife, Betsy, will tell you that I have a good way with dogs, and rarely find one that does not respond to me, but I have never seen anything like Angel. Where I go, she goes, and she hates intensely any separation from me, even for a minute. 

What I failed to mention is that soon after Angel arrived at CILRA, the great people there learned that she was severely diabetic. Not only that, but she had developed blindness from the diabetes. Somehow, the amazing friends of CILRA didn’t see Angel as a lost cause, but they found a doctor to look at her eyes and see what Angel could not see – that her life was far from over, and that the darkness was only temporary. 

Money was collected, how and by whom I do not know (thank you so very much if it came from you!) Her cataract removal may have been just a routine operation that the vet who performed it does on a daily basis, but because of it, this wonderful dog looks at every day with wonder, watching everything in her world with clear vision. 

Her curiosity amazes me as she presides over her kingdom, AKA our back yard. Speaking of the yard, every dog we have ever had learns the underground fence by DogWatch. I have trained them all using a similar process, which is certainly not rocket science, but varies in time and practice for every dog. 

Knowing that we were going to get Angel, Betsy and I had put out the white flags to prepare for the process of training her on the fence. I put the collar on Angel and we walked ONE time around our big yard. 

I don’t know how, but that was all it took. In fact, she learned it so quickly that I told my wife we could take up the flags that day. Betsy has said several times since then that it took more time for us to put out the flags than it took for Angel to learn the fence. In addition to that, Angel does not even wear the yard collar any longer, and still never crosses that boundary line. 

Here’s the truth about angels that Roma Downey’s show was never quite able to capture: real angels rarely arrive with wings and a celestial aura. Sometimes they come as beautiful seven-year-old Labs, diabetic, and looking to be someone’s best friend. They come and astonish you—learning in one walk what took other beloved dogs five months to master. They come when you’ve reached that hard-earned peace, that rescuiescent state where you’ve finally stopped bracing for the next loss. And then, quietly, persistently—never leaving your side when you’re unwell, gluing themselves to you in the kitchen—they teach you the most profound lesson of all: that being touched by an angel isn’t about divine intervention or miraculous transformation. It’s about an extraordinary soul in an ordinary package showing you that your heart, scarred and careful as it may be, still has infinite capacity to be changed forever for the good. And that is why we rescue.