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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 said, 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 from 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.”