As young marrieds Michael and I bought our first home at 482 Mt. Paran Road in Atlanta. This was one of the corner lot anchor homes of a subdivision down Paran Valley. The house directly behind us on Paran Valley belonged to another young married couple, Scott and Shelby Dabney from Dallas, TX. Scott was a commercial real estate developer and the market in the ‘80s was horrible in Dallas so Scott and Shelby moved to Atlanta to work here for awhile and wait for the
Dallas market to recover.

My husband is a lawyer who traveled about 250 nights a year in a national practice. Scott
wasn’t gone quite that much but was gone a lot. So Shelby and I were left to our own devices much of the time. We did everything together. We had all our children at almost the same time. My Emily and her Michael are only a couple months apart; then my Georgia and her Clayton, again, only a few months apart; then my Maggie and her Christina, again, a few months apart. They all grew up like siblings.

One of the things our families used to do was travel to Keystone, CO, each spring break for spring skiing. Scott’s parents had a huge home out there that could easily sleep four couples and kids. Then the Dabney family would go out to spend the week of the Fourth of July. The summer that Clayton was three, the Dabneys made the trip out and decided to take the kids out paddle boating on Lake Dylan. Scott had Michael and Christina out in a boat when he started having chest pains, not like a heart attack but a feeling that something was wrong. He looked back on the dock where they’d left Shelby and Clayton, but no one was on the dock. Shelby had turned her back for a nanosecond and Clayton had fallen in the lake. Shelby immediately dove in and began to dive and look for her son to no avail. On her third dive down, she sees a white hand reaching upward through the murk and swims down to grab it and pull Clayton to the surface. By the time Shelby gets Clayton above water, Scott is back on the dock and reaches down to drag them both up onto the dock. Clayton is not breathing and has no pulse. They immediately start CPR; and, eventually, Clayton starts to sputter and spit up water. Shelby is cradling Clayton in her arms and says, “Hey, Buddy, are you okay?” Clayton says, “I was so scared at first. But then there was a bright yellow light and Jesus was in it and he told me to lift up my hand so my mommy could see me.”

Well, you have to understand that, yes, the Dabneys and the Everts were both “take-our-kids-to-Sunday-school” parents, but the adults frequently met at OHOP in Buckhead for breakfast during our own Sunday School class! That is all to say that we were not telling our children stories about any bright lights.

When the real estate market in Dallas “came back,” the Dabneys moved back to The Park Cities in Dallas. We all cried for months and visited back and forth as often as we could.

A couple years go by, and I’m awakened one night to find my mother, who passed away when I was in my early 20s, standing at the foot of my bed sobbing. I wake Michael up to tell him what’s happening, and he thinks I’m either asleep or crazy. But I knew I was awake and the whole incident left me with a huge feeling of foreboding. Michael was gone most of the next year in a big trial, and we had really lost touch with each other. We decided we needed to leave our children with the au pair and take a week to ourselves in Nevis to try to remember that we still loved each other. Early one morning while we were there, the phone rang in our room. We were still asleep, but I grabbed the phone off the cradle to hear Scott sobbing on the other end. They were in Children’s Hospital with Clayton, and Clayton had been diagnosed with Rhabdomyosarcoma, a very aggressive form of childhood cancer. The prognosis was not good.

The Dabneys are a very prominent family in Texas, and they had lots of support from friends around the country that humble them even to this day. Clayton was the Cattle Baron’s Kid that year, raising money for cancer research. Those 10-gallon Stetsons were overflowing. Clayton fought for about six months, his bones breaking simply from moving an arm or a leg. This precious child never lost his sense of humor or his grace. He never complained, not once. He always said his three angels were with him and he took several pictures of three bright yellow lights against the walls of every room he was in. In the last weeks of his life, the Dabneys brought him to Atlanta to stay with us and we all spent every minute of that time together, just loving each other. The funeral was at the Presbyterian Church in Highland Park, the Dabneys’ church. My husband gave Clayton’s eulogy to a standing-room-only crowd, and there were lots of tears and laughter. Clayton had been such a funny child with a unique outlook. For years after Clayton passed, Georgia would come down for breakfast and say, “Clayton spent the night last night!”

I called Shelby pretty much every day for awhile to check in and see how they were doing. They had had to move Clayton downstairs into their solarium when he couldn’t get upstairs to his bedroom. Shelby said it gutted her to walk by that room every day and remember the hospital bed and the machines and tubes. So I packed my bags and headed to Dallas the next weekend to help Shelby paint the solarium and make some new throw pillows and curtains and the like, just to change it up and make it a happy room again. While we worked, we talked. I asked her if there was anything that gave her comfort. She had a massage therapist at that time that she loved who was very spiritual and used crystals and all kinds of new age things in the session that she said gave her comfort. The therapist kept telling her not to worry about Clayton, that Mary Lou had been in Heaven to welcome him. Shelby laughed that both she and Scott had asked every family member who Mary Lou was to no avail. No Mary Lous. I was shocked. I said, “Shelby, Mary Lou was my mother.” No one knew my mother’s given name as she was always just called Billie.

As most Atlantans know, I am writing a genealogy book about my DeHaven line. I’m about 4000 pages into it now. We have fourteen generations in America. There are a couple little spots in the tree that there isn’t much information. On a lark, I decided to engage a psychic medium to see if they could point me in the right direction. She actually did have some information for me that she espoused for about 1.5 hours. As I’m writing my last notes before we wind up the session, the gal says to me, “Angi, one more thing. There is a young man here who wants to say hello. His name is Clayton. Do you know anyone named Clayton?” I burst into tears and tell her that, yes, I do. She says, “He is drawing stars on a piece of paper and wants you to know that every time you see a star that he’s with you.” When I leave the medium’s house, I’m still pretty shaken up and decide the only thing that can bring me back to reality is going to Costco and buying my groceries. I slug over to Brookhaven and find myself there when everyone else in Atlanta is there. The lines were horrendous. I pick what I think is the best line and begin the wait and the baby steps to the register. I’m getting more and more anxious when I notice that the cashier whose line I’m in has a series of stars tattooed down her neck! I couldn’t help but laugh. Now every time I see a star, I give a little, “Hey, Claytie!”