Ken Babbs told us that on the day Kesey died there was a flock of Canadian Geese roosting in the field across the road from Kesey’s farm. It was a gray-green mid-November day, and when Babbs was driving home from the hospital, his car came down the hill on Ridgeway Road, the top down in the white Cadillac convertible, and as it approached the house, the birds all took off at once. Babbs said it was Kesey’s spirit taking flight, and the reason he knew was that the birds got halfway up in the air, sorting out their formation, and then they made a pass in a big circle over the farm. Babbs was looking up, and he swears they were flying in the outline of a big letter ‘K,’ and they kept at it all the way up over Mt. Pisgah.

You’d have to know Babbs before you could decide if that was a true story or not, but when he told it to us, we believed it because that’s what we wanted to believe, and after all it was a memorial service. I sat up in the balcony, in the dark, and after he told the story about the birds, I didn’t hear much of the rest of what he said because I was thinking about white pelicans and roseate spoonbills.

I have a photo of the last time we took my mom out to the islands to see the birds. There was a wild-life sanctuary with a tower built of logs next to the estuary on the bayside of Sanibel Island, and we took her out to see the flamingos. But there weren’t any flamingos that year, just a flock of spoonbills, a fine stand-in as far as she was concerned. She doesn’t look good in the photo. Maybe it’s the angle of the light, the sun going down in the middle of January clouds, the mangrove spit soaking up the image of its own reflection in the glassy waters of high tide. The birds made her smile, but her face is crooked, twisted with the effort to maintain her vision of life while she looked into the setting sun, and the birds gathered in a big old Australian pine for the coming night.

She died in February, and on that day I was out in my father’s boat, all alone, cruising up to the pass at Boca Grande, putting in at Upper Captiva to swim and eat a picnic lunch and then idling my way along the outside of the islands. It was almost evening when I finally came around Point Isabella. The sunset was spectacular, and just past the lighthouse I ran into a flock of white pelicans, twelve of them flying in formation, two feet above the smooth surface of San Carlos Bay. The ocean was very calm, and I edged the boat right into the open part of their ‘V’. We flew together all the way over to the causeway, right under the drawbridge, and then I eased off and watched them cruise west into a sky of rose highlights, a deepening twilight and the comforting cloak of the Florida night.

My dad met me at the dock, and it wasn’t until we had the boat loaded on the trailer and were washing it down that he told me my mom had passed away that very afternoon. I was able to rinse the engine and get into the truck, but I lost it on the ride home, tears coming in great bursts of sorrow and regret. It was many years later, 17 to be exact, while I sat in the dark at Kesey’s funeral service and suddenly remembered that I had never told my father about the birds.

MOSE TUZIK MOSLEY is a student in the literary nonfiction graduate program at the University of Oregon.