Gold Dust from Beyond the Veil

I woke suddenly, early on the morning of Saturday, September 6th. Something tickled my face. A whisper of a breeze. A light touch. It was bothersome, like the sensation of a loose hair, blown out of place by a gust of wind. The room was dark. The sun had not yet risen over the mountain.

My husband was turned away from me, sound asleep. Our two dogs and the black cat were in their bedroom on the lower floor of the house. I was warm, almost sweaty, so I pushed the covers away and went into the hallway, to adjust the temperature of the air conditioner.

The thermostat screen illuminated the hallway. Just at the edge of my eye, a cloud of gold dust swirled at the stairway, near my legs. I shook my head. Was I dreaming? What is that? I tried to make sense of this phenomena, and rationalized the gold dust was Golden Retriever hair and I badly needed to vacuum.

But why would the hair swirl around my legs? The air was still. I hadn't yet turned on the air conditioning. There were no open windows and no fans running on any of the three levels. The trees surrounding the house were still.

What created the breeze that caused the movement of whatever this was? It wasn't dog hair. It was gold dust, fine and glittering and swirling in the light of the thermostat. Stunned, I flipped the hall light on to get a closer look, and saw nothing.

I examined the wood floor of the hallway, then the carpeted stairs, looking for clues, evidence.

There was no sign of the gold dust. And no dog hair. I lowered the thermostat so the AC kicked on, went back to bed and tried to sleep. I was wide awake. I reached for my phone. An email had come overnight from a friend who lives on the east coast.

"Donna has left us," she wrote. "I went over to watch a movie and found her dead. I think she took and nap and didn't wake up. The covers were pulled up around her. Her eyes were open, her body was cold. Her face was peaceful."

I woke my husband to tell him the news. Then I called my friend. She filled me in on the details. The house was dark when she arrived, the front door locked. She knocked, rang the bell. Called Donna on her cell phone. She didn't know the alarm code, so she walked around the house to a back door, one Donna often left unlocked. She discovered Donna, then summoned emergency services, who contacted the coroner. Eventually her body was taken away. My friend was quite emotional. Donna was her best friend. I cried.

It had been a summer of loss. In June a woman who had been my yoga teacher for five years passed away from Alzheimer's disease. In July, Peter and I lost one of our closest friends, who died from complications from breaking his hip for the third time in less than a year. In August, my former sister-in-law passed away after a devastating fall in her kitchen fractured her skull.

Donna's death, on September 5th, was the fourth death, and the one that surprised me.

Donna was 94, and in excellent health. She was widowed forty years earlier and never remarried. She lived alone in a big house and drove her car daily--to the grocery store, the bank, the post office, academic lectures, and occasional local government meetings. She was an environmental activist and had a wide-ranging interest in many areas of science and politics. She was particularly keen on parapsychology and metaphysics. We had extensive conversations about what happens to souls after bodies pass on.

She believed the veil between the living and the dead was very thin, allowing them to communicate with us, through items either lost or found, or dreams, signs and symbols.

During our extensive conversations, we shared experiences we interpreted as messages from close friends and family members after their deaths. Mine included a bright light streaking across the sky when my father died in a hospital 350 miles away. I also told her about the day in 2007, when I was deeply worried about my younger son, a 23-year-old US Army Infantryman deployed to Ramadi, Iraq. I went for a long hike to try to corral my anxiety. As I walked, my thoughts became a mantra, a prayer. I spoke to my mother, who had passed away two years earlier. I begged her to watch over him.

I turned a corner on the dirt road and something bright and glittery caught my eye. It was a shiny, new dime. I picked it up and examined it. Then I saw another, and another. I found twenty-three silver dimes that day.

Both of these signs meant something to me: my father died during the Haley's Comet watch of 1986. I had been parked, with my then-husband and small children along Paines Prairie, outside Gainesville, Florida that night, hoping to catch a glimpse of the rare comet. My husband had gone off to talk with others, hoping to look through their telescopes, and I remained in the car, in the dark, two children asleep in the back seat. My four-year old son sat on my lap. We whispered and watched the sky. Suddenly a bright light streaked from east to west. My son laughed and pointed. When my husband returned to the car I asked what he thought generated that light. He was puzzled. He hadn't seen a light streaking through the sky.

I knew then my father had passed away after a long and debilitating illness. He was a lover of astronomy, a navigator of the stars who had awaited the return of the comet with great enthusiam. He died without experiencing that once-in-a-lifetime event. Or did he?

And the dimes? My mother always picked up coins she saw in parking lots and on sidewalks. "No matter how old I get I'll always stoop for a penny," she would laugh. "They are gifts from Heaven."

After the earlier summer deaths of my other friends, I wondered if they would somehow communicate with me. The two women had died from neurological disease and trauma and we had not been close for years, but I thought I might hear from Lee, our dear friend and mentor, the one who broke the same hip three times and died from a devastating infection. In late September, two months after his death, I had dinner with his husband in Alabama. I asked if he'd dreamed of Lee, or had any sort of communications, or even felt his presence in the house they shared.

"No, nothing," he said sadly, his voice choked with sorrow.

"Hopefully you will soon," I said. And then, a week ago, during one of my early morning dreams, Lee and I shared a conversation. We sat together in a waiting room, with a third person, a woman whose name I couldn't recall, but I knew was dead. Lee was not his genial, animated self. He was subdued and quiet, as if he was in shock. We talked about places we'd visited together, meals we'd shared in Park City and Las Vegas, Biloxi and Montgomery. We shared memories. Perhaps we said goodbye. I've thought about this dream all week.

Was he communicating with me? Or was I simply wishing we were having a final discussion? Likely we will never know if it's possible to pierce the veil and experience our lost friends, at least until we die. In the meantime we can console ourselves with the idea that we are somehow still surrounded and protected by those we love.

I traveled to Donna's home in early October. She lived in Florida, in a town I called home several decades ago. She left me in charge of her affairs. I found a jeweler's repair receipt tacked onto a bulletin board. I took it to the jeweler and explained she had died. Both the jeweler and his wife were saddened. She had been a good customer for many years. He had been trying to contact her to say he had finished replacing the guardian backs on a pair of earrings. He brought them to me.

I was stunned. The earrings are large and ethereal, dazzling and glittering with a slightly grainy texture. I asked the jeweler what made the gold so yellow, and about the grain. He said the earrings had been made with 24 karat gold, mixed with luster dust.

Gold dust.