I see my father in hawks, and have since the day he died in April 1994. Though the thief macular degeneration hadn’t completely stolen his sight when he died, it had faded and a sightless future weighed heavily on his mind – more so than the conditions that led to the massive heart attack that claimed his life in his sleep one night when no one expected it.

What would he do when he could no longer drive? With only peripheral vision as the disease progressed, he did not see the tractor in front of him until he climbed its drawbar with his shiny red pickup. The only injury was to Dad’s independence and pride.

“Do you think someone is trying to tell me something?” he asked when he sheepishly admitted the accident to me as we spoke on the phone one evening in late 1993. “What do you think, Dad?” I replied, unable to conceive any circumstance in which I might ask him to surrender his driver’s license.

There were big, pressing concerns like that – that his continued driving might result in someone’s death or injury – but also smaller issues of convenience. How would he get to the restaurant in town, where the farmers gathered for coffee and gossip each morning? Fine, he conceded, someone could drive him in, but what would he do when he was ready to come home? Just sit there listening to those blowhards until someone got around to fetching him?

Even in the grief of losing him, I thanked God for not taking his sight. I may have been looking heavenward in silent prayer when my eyes trained on the graceful flight of osprey soaring effortlessly on a thermal updraft, but I’m certain I didn’t make a conscious association between his death and the afterlife. Still, in those first few months after he died when the grief was so fresh that tears came as easily as rain on an early spring day, I counted the hawks obsessively during frequent trips from Central Iowa to Northwest Missouri. On one occasion when I was particularly sad, I spotted about three dozen.

Since then, the birds have become a pleasant reminder that life doesn’t end with death. “You don’t think your dad was reincarnated as a hawk, do you?” asked an incredulous Estle, my “other mother” who married Dad after my birth mother died. She was offended at even the possibility that Dad had come back in the form of a bird of prey that was as happy feeding on road kill as on a field mouse spied from far above.

No, that wasn’t it exactly, though it was comforting to imagine him soaring gracefully and painlessly, encompassing all that took place below with eyesight eight times more powerful than a human’s. Yet it seemed more than coincidence that I began looking for these birds after my father died and, later, looking for him in them. I still don’t have the explanation; it’s enough that these magnificent birds in flight are as comforting as they are beautiful.

We all miss him terribly at Christmas, and maybe that’s why the sky was unusually full of them last weekend as I made the sojourn home. Like silent sentinels keeping careful watch, they were perched at near eye level on fence posts and road signs, almost purposely it seemed, so I wouldn’t miss them. My glances at the barren limbs of trees were rewarded, too, and it seemed the entire species had come out to herald the season.

At each spotting, I smiled and gave a half-salute, merrily calling out, “Hi, Daddy.”

I can’t be sure, but some of them seemed to wave back. Maybe it was the wind current, but perhaps it was something more.