Minutes ago I received a phone call from my mother, a vanishingly rare event. (Normally I do the calling, once a month or so on a Sunday, to stay in touch with family.)

My last remaining grandparent, whom as a child I had nicknamed Gogo—which has stuck to this day—because he was always on his way out the door to go somewhere, has been diagnosed with cancer in both lungs. The prognosis is that he has days, perhaps weeks, but certainly not months. He seems to be ready; apparently he has commented about seeing his wife, my paternal grandmother, soon.

The family is handling the news, and the necessary affairs, as well as can be expected. There is grief, of course, but not shock: The man is, if I recall correctly, in his nineties, which is remarkable, but there always has been that tacit awareness of approaching mortality in everyone’s minds.

Lieutenant Colonel Donald Daniel Bryant, United States Air Force, Retired, has led an extraordinary life. He participated in the Berlin Airlift as a transport pilot, flying supplies into a city blockaded by Cold War politics. During the war immediately preceding that astonishing display of nearly-forgotten American might and will, he was a fighter pilot in the Fourteenth Air Force, the United States Army Air Forces unit that inherited the “Flying Tigers” moniker from its predecessor, the First American Volunteer Group.

Alas, despite his children’s exhortations, he has never written memoirs or consented to interviews, claiming “nobody would be interested” in his stories. I recall my father, Donald Junior, noting with frustration that just a few years ago his father told an anecdote none of them had heard before, a fascinating and suspenseful narrative about the trials and tribulations of deploying halfway around the world in a balky and troublesome single-seat single-engine fighter. My personal theory is that the elder Donald simply may have had little interest in rehashing a possibly traumatic past, or may have felt he had little to say to those disinterested younger generations.

Still, he participated in creating one of the finest legacies any American generation has bequeathed its nation and its people. He is very much a product of his own generation, exemplifying both its awe-inspiring virtues and its idiosyncratic rough edges. He is an upstanding, outstanding man, and we will be diminished in ways we do not even understand upon his passing.

Godspeed, Grandpa Gogo. Someone should fly the Missing Man for you.

Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or ever eagle flew—
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

—“High Flight”, final stanza, by John Gillespie Magee, Jr. (1941)