A few Christmas ornaments are all Lynn Snow has to remind her of her beloved dogs.
Delicate white balls bear the names of Jake, Juno, Jasper and Jojo. A friend of Snow’s brought them over to her Calgary home during the holidays.
“I love my dogs. I would give up everything to have them back. I would give up my house. I would give up my car, my job, everything just to have those poor dogs back,
“They were the world to me,” Snow said.
A fire broke out at Snow’s home in Dover on Oct. 7. She was at the hospital with her daughter visiting her partner James Fancy who was undergoing surgery to remove his appendix. That’s where the couple got the call that their house was on fire.
“At first she didn’t believe them,” recalled Fancy about that night. “I found out a couple of hours later that the dogs didn’t make it.”
No one else was in the house at the time.
“It was really hard. You kind of stumble around a bit and wonder why. The house wasn’t important but the animals were. I’d rather have the dogs because we can always rebuild. The animals you can’t,” Fancy said.
A GoFundMe page was set up by Fancy’s colleague. It helped pay the bills while he was off work recovering from surgery and waiting for insurance payments to come through.
“At first I was kind of skeptical but after I had seen the amount of donations coming in, I thought it was pretty amazing. I didn’t realize that we needed that kind of help but after sitting back and looking at it we realized that it did help us out quite a bit,” Fancy said.
The family is now renovating the home that was damaged in the fire. Photos of their four pets sit in their rented home, adorned in Christmas frames.
The couple said it’s been the support of friends and strangers in the city who have helped them get through their loss at this time of year.
“I have to say, ‘Thank you, guys,’ because this warms my heart that there’s people out there that actually would do this for somebody, because like I said, I never had any faith in the world,” Snow said.