On November 13, 2012, my alarm went off at 6am. I was exhausted having worked until 12am the night before trying to catch up from the move of our stuff into our new house the week before. All I wanted to do was go back to sleep but I had one of those dreams where I could not find Gordie and I could feel the heavy sadness in me coming to the surface. I pulled myself out of bed and put on my running shoes.

It was cold outside. My breath was coming out in short little puffs as I ran through the deserted streets. I ran past my new house that held our stuff but was waiting for us to actually move into.  I barely looked at it. I missed Gordie. I wondered for the billionth time why this had happened to me…and my sons. I thought about the dream of not being able to find Gordie. My mind wandered and as Puff Daddy’s song “I’ll Be Missing You” played on my Ipod, I wondered if my dream about looking for Gordie was symbolic for me looking for signs that he was living in the afterworld and able to see and be with us. As I ran through the path to the road we called “the blind” I wondered, yet again, if I would see Gordie in the after life. Tears started to roll down my face at the thought of never being reunited with him. A sob escaped my mouth as I thought about waiting 50 years to be reunited with him…and then possibly being disappointed.

What if I never get to see him again?

What if I never get to talk to him again?

What if he’s never able to tell me how he died?

It had been eight months and not knowing how he had died had not gotten any easier. I still found myself, multiple times a day, staring into space and wondering how the hell did he die in that pool? Everyone else seemed to have made peace that he died from the heart disease found in the autopsy but me. I just could not do it. The randomness and the questions surrounding Gordie’s death was as difficult for me eight months later as it was that horrible night. How was I going to get through the rest of my life with this unrest?

Would he ever be able to tell me what happened?

I rounded the corner into my parents, and now my, neighborhood. The sun was fully up. I jogged up the road about 1/8 of a mile and glanced up at the mountain behind our neighborhood. What I saw actually caused me to stumble a couple of steps.

The clouds were in the form of a giant, wide Cross. The Cross looked like it was shooting up from behind the mountain and straight into the sky. I have never, ever seen clouds make that kind of formation. It could not have been larger or more vivid.  It was absolutely gigantic, the clouds were fluffy, and behind the cross the sky was clear blue.

Holy crap I thought. Is this a sign from God and Gordie that there is indeed an afterlife, that Gordie’s there, and that I will see him again?

The Cross stayed in place. I could barely tear my eyes from it as I ran to my parents’ house. Again, I had never seen anything like it.  I was kicking myself for not having my phone with me so I could take a picture.

All day I thought about that Cross.

Was it the sign that I had been desperately looking for all these months?

The next day was Nathan’s first reconciliation. Freaky.

A friend of mine who I told the story to a few weeks later pointed out something else freaky…the mountain’s name is Diablo.