his being was, and he gave me a puzzled look. I tried to explain that all things had a starlight looking over them. Even the dogs and cats had a little sparkle that followed—even my turtle and the horned toads in my reptile zoo. I told him of the dark shade that floated along behind his bike. He shrugged and gave me an odd look that older kids do when younger ones babble incoherently. He waved goodbye with a quirky smile and a nod, and that was the last time I saw him … alive.
The next week he didn’t come, and that Saturday a funeral cortege drove slowly by, the long line of cars blazing with headlights against the foggy coastal sky. The black car in the lead held my curiosity. I’d never seen a car with curtains before; it seemed to me the perfect mobile dollhouse. I looked hard to see who was inside, a mystery that clearly needed explaining. I asked my father what it all meant. He hesitated and told me a car had hit our newspaper boy and killed him, and he took the opportunity to impress upon me some rules about bike safety, as I’d just gotten my training wheels off. Having been so young and having never known death, I asked him what killed meant. He looked at me, his face twisted in puzzlement, trying to put together the right words that would leave me unscathed until I really needed to know. He told me our paperboy would be sleeping for a very, very long time. Nothing like this had ever occurred. I was really confused.
Over the days that followed, I pestered him to take me to find the paperboy so I could wake him from his enchanted sleep of killed. My father told me he was at the cemetery. In Monterey, California, there is a cemetery next to Dennis the Menace Park. One day he took me to the park to play and I sounded out the words on the sign nearby—San Carlos Cemetery. I begged him to take me inside. He hesitated, but I began to tear up and got a very disappointed look on my face, then crossed my arms in defiance. He knew he would have a fight on his hands, so he took the high road and said, “Okay.” Off we went, me skipping speedily away from him in a pastel dress, my Keds leaping and my pigtails flying behind me. I now imagine my father trying to think of a way to explain the whole sleeping thing as we traveled toward Death’s gates.
I’m sure my father thought he had an out, as we hadn’t known the newspaper boy’s name and in the huge cemetery it would have been like finding a needle in a haystack. So that might have been the end of the story, except it wasn’t. It was just the start. I looked down the rows of old tombstones, overwhelmed by the possibilities of which one could be his marker over the subterranean place he lay in his slumber of killed. I wondered how he was breathing since there was no air underground; we had no time to lose. We had to get him out quickly! I remembered the frantic state in which I began looking for some kind of clue for his location. I suddenly looked up and saw a brief glimpse of a boy in a familiar baseball cap dodge behind a tree. It was him, and he wasn’t sleeping at all, or underground. As we hadn’t even brought shovels, I was flooded with relief.
I broke into a run, stumbling over the uneven ground. I skinned my knees, each time I fell catching myself just in time to keep from landing flat on my face on the old earthquake-damaged cement curbs. After what seemed like a million close calls and ignoring my father’s shouts to slow down, I arrived at the tree. Looking down, I touched the etched words in a ground marker warm with sunshine. I traced what I felt was surely his name. My father, out of breath, caught up with me and looked at the marker. He was pale as the words came slowly from his mouth, “How did you find it?”
“He was here, at the tree. He’s playing hide-and-seek,” I explained, “This killed sleep is wrong, Daddy. He was here; he’s not sleeping at all.” I looked around, trying to offer my father some proof the boy was still among us—as I thought someone should tell his mother—but found nothing.
My life got stranger and stranger. As happens with most children, I stopped seeing auras when everyone else said they didn’t exist. But I continued to see other things, things that became harder and harder to explain. We moved to Hawaii, and I became well versed in the local lore and the spirits of the islands that are always present and acknowledged by the locals. I was surrounded by people who saw what I saw and kids who wouldn’t go down jungle paths because of an ancestral war that happened there hundreds of years before. Kids who respected the dead because the dead weren’t so dead after all.
When I was eight, I cut school and drowned while surfing. After I was done fighting the undertow, I surrendered to having the most amazing, peaceful experience, which I would later liken to what Einstein said about what death must feel like—all of the body’s atoms exploding into the universe and becoming part of everything else. More recently the experience was described by Steve Jobs’s last words on his deathbed: “Oh, wow! Oh, wow! Oh, wow!” Oh, wow! indeed.
I was dead when a sailor dragged me out of the surf, pumped the salt water out of my lungs, and brought me back, bringing forth a trail of expletives even he couldn’t fathom coming from the small girl whom he had awakened from what I now call The Perfect Sleep.
My father was in special ops, and after his seven tours in Vietnam, my family moved back to the mainland (the Silicon Valley, in this case). I learned to wear shoes and jeans; one experience wearing a traditional mu‘umu‘u to school with trendy Silicon Valley kids was all it took for me to learn new dress codes and to take the flowers out of my hair. The new kids I met didn’t have mythology, or a common background. I’d gone from the happiest place on earth to some pretty harsh realities—not only were these kids kind of mean, but they knew nothing of the spirit world except fear.
Life changed as my parents became engineers, and I found new friends—and they were nothing like my old friends. My best friend, Deedee Gates, was a trippy chick the same age as I was, who knew all about life after death, could light candles in her house without getting into trouble, and turned me on to her mom’s metaphysical library, which I voraciously devoured over a summer. She disappeared just as quickly as she’d appeared in my life and moved away to points unknown, but not before leaving a major impact and introducing me to the great mystic Sybil Leek. I was soon leading ghost tours through the abandoned Victorian houses surrounded by tract-housing developments that seemed to spring up overnight in the rich soil of old Santa Clara Valley fruit orchards. The grand old homes were earmarked for demolition to make way for more tract housing.
I told the groups of kids on the tours about the people who once lived in the houses and the current spirits that inhabited them, often conducting séances that would bring about unexplained rappings from the walls and ceilings. Kids were frightened and ready to jump at any unexplained sound—including the police we’d often have to outrun for trespassing, which only added to the infamy and popularity of the tours. Charging for the tours over many summers, I saved enough to purchase a 1969 Ford Mustang on my sixteenth birthday.
Off to college, where I had little time for anything else but work and school, and then off to life and career. Although I was happy in my positions as investigative journalist, author, managing editor, technologist, and startup consultant (and many other career experiences), I still found myself wanting more. I took a job to do a company turnaround in Vegas and one lonely evening lit a candle that the candle-maker had wrapped with a label reading LOVE. A week later, my old high school sweetheart living in another state came to find me. It was then I surrendered my heart, moved back to California, and connected with my haunted roots.
The next year, I drove to BookExpo America in New York City. On the way, I ran into pre-Katrina weather from Florida to Texas, where I was hit by lightning. This, only a few days before I was expected home and then to get back on a plane to cover the story of Lily Dale, New York, the city inhabited by mediums who talk with the dead. The lightning strike has left me with health concerns. I had to remove all the metal from my teeth because the strike had made any food on a metal utensil taste like aluminum foil, and it also did a job on my optic nerves—but, in the end, I’m okay. Exhausted and fragile, I flew out on schedule, reached Lily Dale, and began receiving messages from my old dead friend, Paul, who was contacting everyone around me with his name and detailed descriptions of himself, his job, and our friendship. He gave them all messages to tell me he was still a physicist on the Other Side and was still working
