Death of His Son
In 1984, Kesey's 20-year-old son, Jed, a wrestler for the University of Oregon, was killed on the way to a tournament when the team's bald-tired van crashed. It went off the road in icy conditions and down a 185-ft slope. One team member, named Lorenzo West, was killed instantly, and Jed suffered a severe head injury. After two days in the hospital, he was declared brain dead, and his parents gave permission for his organs to be harvested. According to Kesey in a letter he wrote to friends at the time, 12 of Jed's organs were transplanted.
This deeply affected Kesey, who later said Jed was a victim of conservative, anti-government policy that starved the team of proper funding. There is a memorial dedicated to Jed on the top of Mount Pisgah, which is near the Keseys' home in Pleasant Hill. At a Grateful Dead Halloween concert just days after promoter Bill Graham died in a helicopter crash, Kesey appeared on stage in a tuxedo and delivered a eulogy while the Grateful Dead was playing the song "Dark Star", and he mentioned that Graham had paid for Jed's mountain-top memorial.
Read more about this topic: Ken Kesey
Famous quotes containing the words death and/or son:
“Do thou but close our hands with holy words,
Then love-devouring death do what he dare,
It is enough I may but call her mine.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“While they stand at home at the door he is dead already,
The only son is dead.
But the mother needs to be better,
She with thin form presently drest in black,
By day her meals untouch’d, then at night fitfully sleeping, often waking,
In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with one deep longing,
O that she might withdraw unnoticed, silent from life escape and
withdraw,
To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)