Signs Read online

  There was one more sign Caleb was determined to send.

  Caleb had a very specific message for his father, Tim, who during the reading was lying next to Eliza on Caleb’s bed, listening in.

  “Caleb is saying, ‘Daddy, you have something in your pocket or in your wallet that is really significant,’ ” I told them. Tim was in his pajamas at the time and didn’t have his wallet, but he was wearing a necklace and asked if that was what Caleb meant.

  “It’s not a necklace,” I conveyed. “It’s like a little piece of art. And Caleb wants you to know that he is as close to you as that little piece of art in Daddy’s wallet.”

  But Tim knew what was in his wallet, and there was no piece of artwork in it. He was so sure it wasn’t there, he didn’t even bother to look.

  It was only later that day that Tim sat down and emptied out his wallet, just to double-check.

  And in it, he found what looked like a small receipt. It was a tiny piece of folded-up paper. Tim carefully unfolded it, and gasped.

  It was a drawing of three yellow flowers next to a tree, by Caleb.

  I told them that three yellow flowers and a tree would be another sign that Caleb would send them.

  The next morning, Eliza sat in her dining room and stared out the window. There were trees and yellow flowers everywhere, so how was she supposed to know which ones were sent by Caleb?

  A small sticker on one of the three picture windows in her kitchen caught her eye, and she got up to remove it. Caleb had put dozens of stickers of flowers and butterflies and leaves on the windows; over time some had fallen off and some had been scraped off. Nearly all of the stickers were gone. In fact, there were just three stickers left.

  Suddenly Eliza froze in her tracks. She stepped back to look at the last three stickers.

  Each one was of a yellow flower.

  Eliza sat back in her chair. She called Tim over from the living room, and she showed him the three yellow flowers.

  “That’s pretty close,” Eliza said. “All that’s missing is the tree.”

  Tim laughed. Then he sat down next to Eliza and pointed.

  “Look through the window,” he said.

  And there in their front yard, framed perfectly by the windows and the three yellow flower stickers, was a big, beautiful, arching green tree.

  * * *

  —

  The signs have continued. On a recent camping trip, Caleb’s three-year-old sister Jenna innocently handed her mother a tiny bouquet of flowers she’d just picked—exactly three yellow daffodils.

  “Why are you giving me these?” Eliza asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jenna said. “Something just told me to give them to you.”

  And balloons—always balloons. And consecutive numbers, too. “Just yesterday, the range on my electric car said 111 miles,” Eliza said. “I thought, Gee, that’s neat, but I let my logical mind kind of talk me out of it being a sign from Caleb. The very next day, after driving somewhere completely different, I came home and plugged in the car and the range was 111 miles again. The signs just keep coming, and if I ever have a doubt, something incredible will happen that just smacks me in the face.”

  Tim, who has always been the more skeptical of the two, decided to ask Caleb for a secret sign on his own. He didn’t tell another soul about it. The morning after he asked for the sign, Eliza told him to go outside and bring in the family cats.

  “Why?” Tim asked.

  “Because I smell skunk.”

  Tim sat back down on the bed.

  “What’s wrong?” Eliza asked.

  “The skunk,” he said. “I can smell it, too. I asked Caleb to send me a skunk. And now, here it is—a skunk.”

  Caleb had told me one other thing during my reading with Eliza—he said that his parents were going to fight for a law that would bear his name.

  Today Caleb’s Law—which requires dentists to have an anesthesiologist present during all surgeries, rather than administer the anesthesia themselves—is on its way to being enacted in Caleb’s home state.

  “The dental lobby is powerful, so it’s been a hard fight,” said Eliza. “But Caleb is fighting right alongside us. The first time Tim’s sister, who is a doctor, sent an email to our local congressman about the bill, the email went out at exactly 11:11 A.M.”

  Despite all the signs and messages from Caleb, there are times when his loved ones still feel the pain of his loss from this earth. Some nights, Eliza and Tim will sit together and read from Llama and the Dominina, so that Caleb’s voice—so full of love and passion and excitement and ideas—can come alive in their home once more.

  “I miss him every single second of every day,” Eliza says. “But there is also a lot of joy in knowing that he is still here with us. When my friends ask about Caleb, they always ask, ‘How is he?,’ as if he’s still around.”

  …even out of unspeakable grief, beautiful things take wing.

  —A. R. TORRES, “The Lessons of Loss”

  5

  DRAGONFLIES AND DEER

  THEY called themselves the Four C’s—Carla and Chris and their two young sons, Calder and Caleb. They were a team, always together, always laughing, always having fun. “Calder’s joy in life is joking around,” says Carla, who married Chris in 2003 and started a TV production company with him. “Caleb is such a joker. Calder and Caleb shared a room and they loved cracking each other up.”

  Their happiness was like a dream, beautiful and perfect—until, inconceivably, the dream came to an end.

  When Calder was just seven years old, he was electrocuted by a faulty light in a swimming pool, and crossed.

  It was unthinkable, impossible—why did all the laughter have to stop? Carla and Chris searched for answers, searched for solace, but nothing seemed to help.

  Yet in the days and weeks following her son’s passing, Carla could not shake the feeling that Calder was still, somehow, present.

  “I had this feeling that he was sending me messages,” Carla told me. “But it didn’t make any sense, so I felt like the real explanation had to be that I was going crazy.”

  One afternoon, Carla was driving her car when a tiny baby dragonfly flew around her head and landed next to the driver’s-side window. She had no idea how or when it got into the car. She kept driving, and the dragonfly didn’t move. She stopped at a red light, rolled down the window, but the dragonfly didn’t budge. “When I finally got to my destination, I got out of the car and the baby dragonfly got out with me, flew around me for a while, and then just flew away.”

  And in that moment, Carla had a thought.

  “I wondered, Was that Calder?” she says. “The pain was still very raw, and I realized I’d been crying the whole drive, and then I stood there and tried to figure out what had just happened. It felt like Calder was trying to send me a message, but I just couldn’t quite grasp that it was real.”

  For the rest of that summer, Carla saw dragonflies everywhere. On the doorknob. On a wall. In the bathroom. “I was in a swimming pool and my sister-in-law said, ‘Do you know a dragonfly has been sitting on your head for a while?’ ” Carla says. “And all these kids were around me and splashing the water and making all this noise, but the dragonfly just sat there on my head. It didn’t want to leave.”

  But how could a dragonfly possibly be a message from anyone?

  * * *

  —

  Carla found her way to me through a mutual friend, and she came to my house on Long Island for our reading. I made sure that my mother took our dog Roscoe to her house so he wouldn’t interrupt the reading, but I let our cat roam free. Then Carla and I sat down at the kitchen table. Moments later, Calder pushed his way through. He showed me something that led me to ask Carla a question.

  “Do you happen to be allergic to cats?”

  Yes, Carla sai
d, she was.

  “Okay. Well, I have a cat that always sits with me here in the kitchen, and Calder is telling me, ‘You shouldn’t have sent the dog away, you should have sent the cat away,’ and now he’s going to keep the cat out of the kitchen for you.”

  Sure enough, our cat—who always sits with anyone who comes into the kitchen—was nowhere to be found during the reading.

  Calder continued to come through in the most remarkable way—so full of energy and excitement and love.

  Typically, when I connect with someone on the Other Side, I ask them to send me their name as validation. However, I don’t always get the full name. I might get a strong sound or the image of a single letter. In Carla’s case, I picked up on a big C, referring to someone on the Other Side. Then I picked up that there was another C, and another one, and another, all of them here on earth—four C’s in all. I told Carla about the four C’s, and she told me what they meant—her and Chris, and their sons Caleb and Calder. The core, the unit, the team.

  Then something amazing happened in the reading.

  Calder showed me that his family was about to go on a trip, and Carla confirmed that this was true. Calder then showed me the exact way he intended to send a message to Carla during the trip, so she’d know he was there with them the whole time. It’s very unusual for someone who has crossed to be so specific about the sign they are planning to send, but Calder was very clear.

  “Calder is going to send you a deer,” I said. “I see it very clearly. And he wants you to know that you will have a direct encounter with the deer. Carla, he is saying that this is for you, so you will know that he is with you and around you the whole time. He wants to send you a direct message, so the encounter between you and the deer will be a direct one.”

  Calder had one other important message to share with his mother.

  “He is sending you messages all the time, and he sees that you are getting them, but that you’re immediately questioning them,” I said. “Calder is telling you, ‘Stop doing that. Stop questioning.’ ”

  * * *

  —

  After the reading, Carla kept the message about the deer to herself. She didn’t quite know what to make of it. A direct encounter? What did that mean?

  A few weeks before the family left for England, Chris and Carla decided to go to the Florida Keys for the weekend. On the long drive down, Carla fell asleep. She was startled awake by Chris saying, “Oh wow.”

  “What is it?” Carla asked.

  “We just passed them,” he said. “On the side of the road. I’ve never seen them before!”

  “What was it? What did you see?”

  “Four key deer,” Chris said.

  Key deer are a rare and endangered subspecies of deer that live only in the Florida Keys. They are smaller than regular deer and very elusive. Chris had been to the Keys many times, but he’d never seen a key deer. And now, suddenly, there were four of them at the side of the road.

  “Can you believe it?” Chris said. “Four key deer!”

  Carla’s reaction surprised him. She started to cry, tears streaming down her cheeks, devastated that she’d missed the message intended for her.

  “I was devastated,” she said. “I didn’t see them. Chris woke me up a second too late. I told him why I was upset, because Laura had said how the deer message was supposed to be for me. Chris offered to turn the car around and look for the key deer, but I thought, Okay, don’t be so picky. What are the chances of seeing not one but four key deer on the road? We were the four C’s, and there were four deer. So I let it go, and we had the most wonderful weekend. But inside, I was still devastated.”

  They left Key West on Sunday morning and started the long drive home. Just minutes into the drive, Chris pulled the car over at a bar called the No Name Pub. He told Carla he needed to use the bathroom, and went inside.

  Chris hadn’t been totally truthful, though. He did go to the bathroom, but not for the obvious reasons. Chris had heard about the bar and one of its traditions: Patrons would write someone’s name on a dollar bill and tape it to the wall or the ceiling, to honor them. With a Sharpie, Chris wrote CALDER on a bill and taped it to a choice spot on the wall. He left the bar and headed toward the car, but was stopped cold in his tracks. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

  * * *

  —

  While Chris was in the bar, Carla stayed in the car with Caleb. She stared straight out the front window, lost in thought. She was thinking about Calder. A light rain was falling, and the parking lot was empty except for a few other cars and some picnic tables. A movement caught her eye and she turned toward the edge of the parking lot.

  There, emerging from a small row of bushes, was a deer.

  Carla gasped. She slowly and carefully got out of the car, careful not to frighten the deer away. But he didn’t seem scared. He looked straight at Carla and then—incredibly—began slowly walking toward her. That was the moment that Chris came out of the bar.

  “Don’t move,” Carla told him. “Just take a picture.”

  The deer came within ten feet of her, close enough for Carla to look into his clear, beautiful eyes. Then he crept two feet closer. And then closer still. Carla held her breath and didn’t move. The deer came even closer.

  Finally, only two feet separated Carla and the deer. Slowly, she extended her hand, palm up. The deer stepped forward and gently put his nose in her hand. He stayed there for several moments, allowing Carla to cradle his face. Then the deer tilted his head and looked up at Carla. Their eyes locked. After what seemed like the longest time, the deer turned around and walked away. Carla, Chris, and Caleb remained motionless, watching him head back toward the bushes—where he turned around, gave them one last look, and then disappeared into the foliage, out of sight.

  * * *

  —

  Carla stood there in something like shock. Other than cats or dogs, she had never been that close to an animal before, much less a wild animal. As the deer approached her, she felt nervous, but when he laid his head in her hand, she felt only sweetness and joy.

  “What just happened?” she asked Chris. “Was that real?”

  “It was real,” Chris said. “Very real.”

  Carla took stock of her emotions. She thought she might cry, but she didn’t. “There was nothing sad about what happened at all,” she says. “At that moment, all I felt and all Chris felt was awe. Sheer awe.”

  Standing there in the parking lot, Chris was the first to speak.

  “Well, if that wasn’t a message from Calder,” he said, “I don’t know what is.”

  Back in the car, Carla cried. “It wasn’t out of sadness or grief or anything like that,” she says. “It was more out of relief. Relief that I hadn’t missed my big moment with Calder. I was so upset about not having seen the four key deer. I tried not to show it, but the whole weekend I was just so upset. But then Calder—Calder was never going to let me miss that moment.”

  After that, deer became one of the signs that Calder uses to let his parents know he is still around, still with them, still part of the family.

  “We see them everywhere, but in kind of unusual ways,” Carla says. “One time, we took Caleb to the water park and on the big waterslide. As we stood in line to go down the slide, I started thinking of Calder, because going down the slide with his brother was always one of his favorite things to do. And just then I looked up, and the man standing in front of us in line was wearing a muscle T-shirt that showed a big tattoo on his biceps. It was a tattoo of a big, beautiful deer.”

  In that instant, Carla says, “I knew Calder was right there on the slide with Caleb and me.”

  For Carla, receiving that remarkable sign—and accepting it as a communication from Calder—changed her life.

  “It gave me strength, and it opened my heart and my mind to getting signs fr
om Calder,” she says. “It convinced me that Calder really is always with us. Losing a young child so suddenly, I can’t even explain how hard that is. And I really feel like getting that message from Calder helped me get through it. It was such a blessing. The Four C’s are still together, and we always will be.”

  6

  BUDDIES ON THE OTHER SIDE

  ONE more remarkable thing happened in my reading with Carla.

  Very early in the reading, when Calder came through, before I knew his brother’s name, he was very insistent in bringing forward another boy who had recently crossed. He gave me a lot of information about this boy—his name, how he died, how he was doing now—and I shared it all with Carla.

  “He’s bringing me a boy on the Other Side named Caleb,” I told her. “This is a boy who went to the dentist and got anesthesia and crossed over. Calder is telling me that he and Caleb are together and working as a team on the Other Side.” I knew immediately who Caleb was: Calder had brought Eliza and Tim’s son to me.

  Carla and Eliza were strangers, but their sons no longer were. Their sons, who had crossed at different times and in different ways, were buddies on the Other Side. Carla didn’t quite know what to make of this. Then Calder came through with more information.

  “Wait a minute, is there also a boy named Caleb here?” I asked.

  Yes, Carla said. Calder’s younger brother was named Caleb.

  “That’s what Calder is saying,” I went on. “He is laughing about it and he is saying that he has a Caleb here and another Caleb there.”

  For Carla, it was a beautiful validation not only that her son was still with her, but that her grief and sorrow were not hers alone. The Calder-Caleb friendship was an affirmation that we are all connected to one another, and all meant to help one another to heal and grow here on earth. And that those on the Other Side work together to facilitate it.