Toward the end of the family picnic, my mother-in-law took me aside and said, “Will you write Gavin’s obituary? When the time comes?” in a tone of voice in which she might have asked for a ride home. “It’s hard to think about these things,” she added, “but you have to face facts.”

Vernice, 83, lives alone at the assisted-living place. A few days after they’d moved in, Gavin had been transferred to a nursing home, and Vernice had been too dazed to argue. He was too far gone for the degree of assistance provided there, and everybody knew it except Vernice. Or maybe she did know it. Maybe that’s why she dragged her feet for so long, clinging to the apartment, doing her best to be independent for both of them, fearing that if they moved they would be separated. Which is exactly what happened. It’s the first time Vernice has lived alone in more than sixty years.

“Sure,” I said. “Of course.”

“You’re the writer in the family, so I thought you ought to do it,” said Vernice. She gave a little heave and a sigh, indicating that it was settled.

Gavin Dykes Brown was born in Evanston, Illinois, on June 23, 1919.

The nursing home is too far away for Vernice to walk, and she is beyond figuring out the buses. There are taxis, but she seldom allows herself the luxury of one. On our last visit, John and I drove her over to see him. It was a hot day, and the air conditioning felt good when we walked through the double glass doors. The day room was spacious, with a grand piano in one corner and a television in another, playing at top volume. It’s a nice place, an expensive place, no urine odors, only the faint mildewy smell of old people shrinking inside their clothes.

“Mr. Brown!” said the aide to Gavin’s dozing supine figure. “Mr. Brown, you have company!” She was a slender, quick-moving woman with an African accent. Gavin stirred and opened his eyes. “Hello,” he said. He registered recognition at Vernice’s face, looked blankly at John and me. The aide slid her elbows into his armpits and swung him up sitting. She slid corduroy slippers onto his pale feet, and then, bracing his feet with hers, expertly leveraged his long frame into the waiting wheelchair.

He was raised in Toronto, Canada, but came back to the United States in his mid-teens.

Pushing Gavin ahead of us, she led us to a table in a small sitting room off the day room. “I’ll leave you to visit,” she said with a smile, and departed.

We sat for a while in silence. Gavin leaned into his elbows.

“How are you?” said Vernice.

“Oh, I’m fine. Getting along. The food doesn’t have much to recommend it.” He was never a conversationalist. When I joined the family it took me a while to get the hang of my father-in-law’s pattern. He’d nod perfunctorily at your remarks and then either look away in silence or, less often, launch into a story. Sometimes the story would be related to the topic at hand, sometimes not. His stories were often about the War, about his bombing sorties over Hanover and Dresden, the times he limped back across the Channel with two engines gone or three engines gone, or the tail full of bullet holes, or his copilot dead or four men dead or eight men dead, or the whole crew dead except him.

Today there were no stories, only a polite gaze. He turned to me and asked courteously, “How are the children?” as if he’d prompted himself to remember his manners.  

He spent his young manhood traveling extensively through the United States.

“Oh, they’re fine,” I said. “Mary is living in California now, and young Gavin is still in Portland.” I watched for his eyes to register something at the mention of his namesake, but they didn’t. He nodded, settled back into himself.

John said, “We came up from Oregon to see you.” Gavin regarded him mildly. “You remember we’re living in Oregon now?” John said. We’ve lived in Oregon for twenty-five years.

“Oh, yes, of course,” said Gavin. “How do you like it there?”

The aide came by. “How are you doing?” she asked.

“I think he’s a little tired,” Vernice replied, and Gavin did seem worn out by the effort. The young woman wheeled him back to his room. We followed in silence and sat down on the other twin bed. On the wall was a sepia-tinted photo of Gavin in his Army Air Corps cap, a handsome, jug-eared young man with a shy smile. He looked a little like Jimmy Stewart, and he always liked it when people told him so.

“Down you go,” said the aide, fluffing and patting him into bed. “All set!” She turned and gave us a bright smile. “Thank you for coming,” she said. “It means a lot to them.”

At the outbreak of the Second World War he joined the U.S. Army Air Corps.

As we drove Vernice back to the assisted-living place, I saw her tremble a little, and I reached forward and put my hand on her right shoulder. “It’s hard,” she said, dabbing at her eyes with her fingers. “It’s just hard, that’s all.”

“There’s Kleenex in the side pocket there,” I said. I had never seen my mother-in-law cry. She was a widow with six children when she married Gavin in 1961. John was fourteen and the eldest boy. His father, Robert Chalmer Wells, had died of a heart attack barely a year before, and John was coping about as well as any thirteen-year-old boy would, moving through his days as if through a glass shop, wrapping himself tightly, trying not to break anything.

“You’re the man of the family now,” his mother told him two weeks after the funeral. “Enough crying. Time to move on.”

He made up for his lack of formal schooling by long hours of self-tutoring, which enabled him to meet the Army’s requirements for pilot training.

At fifteen John was working for his stepfather’s construction business, digging out the corners of swimming pool excavations and wheelbarrowing the dirt up the steep ramp. Sometimes Gavin would let him build concrete forms or frame up a deck. He was a hard boss. “That is the crappiest work I’ve ever seen. What’s wrong with you? You got cotton in your ears? Or maybe in your brain? You get back down there, and I don’t want to see your face till it’s done right.” At lunchtime John would climb into the pickup truck with his stepfather. Gavin would crank up the radio to preclude all conversation, and the two of them would sit and chew their sandwiches and drink coffee out of Gavin’s big Thermos.

He was sent to England, his mother’s birthplace, and flew B-17 and B-24 bombers.

At dinner, Gavin would eat his food with purpose, head down, letting the conversation flow around him. When he was in an expansive mood he would tell stories about his boyhood in Toronto. His grandfather was a prominent doctor. His father fought in the First World War and fell in love with a London dance-hall girl. He came home after the war, but he couldn’t forget his sweetheart. So he returned to England and married her and brought her back to Toronto. The scandal caused the family to be dropped from the Social Register. They had five children, her motherhood interspersed with her numerous affairs. “My mother was a prostitute,” Gavin said. It was hard to tell whether he meant this literally, or whether he was ashamed of it.

He flew 35 missions and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Air Medal, and a Presidential Citation for bravery.

After a few years his mother went back to England, leaving the children behind. Gavin’s grandfather, the doctor, went over there and dragged her back. He had no love for his daughter-in-law, but she had made her bed and now was obliged to lie in it.

The family held together for a few more years. Gavin’s father was not around much, and when he was he had nothing good to say to his children; they were failures, screw-ups, blots on the family name. Eventually he divorced his wayward wife, but by that time the Great Depression was on, and Gavin had left home. He was fourteen. He bucked bales in Kansas, picked fruit in California, scrubbed filling-station toilets, slept in his boots in the hobo jungles.

After a couple of years on the bum, he went back to Toronto and tried to join the Canadian air force, but he was too young, and besides, he had only an eighth-grade education. Then he tried the U.S. Army Air Corps. They didn’t care about his age, but they told him he needed algebra and geometry to pass the exam. “So I went to the library and read every book I could find on algebra and geometry, and I taught myself,” he told us.  Sometimes he added, a touch bitterly, “I didn’t have the advantage of a college education.” By that time the United States was in the war. He passed the exam, and the Army shipped him off to England.

Returning home after the war, Mr. Brown went to work as a building contractor, first in southern California, then in Seattle, where he specialized in swimming-pool construction.

When our son was born in 1977, we named him Gavin Robert. The middle name was to honor John’s dead father. The first name was a gesture of peace from a young man to a stepfather with whom he’d had a fraught relationship. “I hated him sometimes,” John said. “It took me a long time to realize what a damaged person he was. War will do that to you, and so will a terrible childhood. I can forgive him now, but I still don’t feel any warmth toward him.”

He married the widowed Vernice Wells and helped raise her six children.

Our son came for dinner the other night, and I told him about his grandmother’s request that I write the obituary. “Wow,” he said. “I guess she likes to think ahead.”

“Give me your memories,” I said.

He stirred his coffee. “There was the time Grandpa flew a bombing raid over Braunschweig, and the plane got shot up so bad that he came back into the airfield on one engine.”

I remembered my father-in-law telling that story, more than once. In fact, he had it down so well that the phrases came out like polished agates.

“On one engine,” Gavin would say.  Then he’d pause.  He had learned to pause, meaningfully, when telling the story.

“Later, a group of engineers from Boeing came out to the airfield and inspected the airplane.” He pronounced it in the old-fashioned way, “aeroplane.” Pause.

“They found that it couldn’t fly. Could. Not. Fly.” Here he’d probe us with his pale-blue eyes, holding our gaze for several seconds.

“There was no physical way it could fly.” Then, ponderously, “There was Someone looking out for me that day.” He was not religious.

 “I used to love to hear Grandpa tell that story,” our son said. As a toddler, young Gavin brought out a rare sweetness in his grandfather. Cuddling the boy on his lap, Grandpa Gavin would point to the pictures in the airplane book and say the names: P-51 Mustang, B-17 Flying Fortress, B-24 Liberator, Corsair, Zero. As a teen-ager our son read prodigiously about the war, and today he knows all the battles by heart, their dates, commanders, strategies, tactics, and outcomes.

Over the years Mr. Brown built hundreds of swimming pools for Seattle-area clients.

“But then I was on the internet one day,” said our son, “reading some pilots’ stories, and I ran across that very story that Grandpa told. The exact same story. Kind of made me go ‘Hmm, well, maybe it could happen twice.’”

I remembered the time John’s youngest brother, Paul, asked his stepfather at a family gathering, “Dad, you remember that time you flew the B-24 home with all eight crewmen on board dead? I’ve been looking around, trying to track down some record of that.” I looked at Paul sharply, but his face revealed nothing but interest.

“But I haven’t had much luck,” Paul said. “You think you can remember the month it happened?”

Vernice shot Paul a warning glance, but he wasn’t looking. She leaned over to me with a grimace and whispered, “That’s his best story!”

 We were remembering this at dinner. “Yeah,” said John, our other son, “I guess we all sort of wondered about it. When I was a kid, I thought he was a hero. Looking back on it now, I guess that’s what he needed to be, a hero. At least to a little kid.”

He thought some more, then said, “He was a terrible driver. I wonder if it’s okay to say that in an obituary. He almost killed me several times.”

Mr. Brown maintained his pilot’s license and flew his family on excursions to Mexico, Canada, and numerous points around the Northwest.

Gavin was distracted and impatient behind the wheel, shooting across lanes, gunning through yellow lights, swearing at the other cars. With his six-foot-three frame folded into a driver’s seat, he seemed like a trapped animal. He put multiple dings in their cars, had several rear-end accidents, and once T-boned a city bus.

Rolling into Boeing Field, where his Piper Comanche was moored, he became a different man, cool and purposeful. He would circle the airplane slowly, wiggle the ailerons and the rudder, check the prop for the proper pitch and resistance, yank the wing struts, get down on his knees and measure the pressure in the tires, open the cowling and bleed off some gasoline from the carburetor and check it for water. Check the oil. Check the antenna screws. Check the engine mounts. Slam the cowling and make sure it was latched.

Then he’d climb into the cockpit and pull the wheel up and down and turn it right and left, watching the ailerons and rudder. Check the radios, the flaps, and a dozen other things. Finally, he would strap on his seat belt and start the engine. “Tower, this is Nancy Five Six Seven Three Papa, preparing for takeoff.”

Then, likely as not, he’d turn to his passenger and say, “There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.”

He told good stories.

“You remember his story about getting chewed out by Jimmy Stewart?” said John. “I think that’s his best one.”

Toward the end of the war, on a day off from flying a bombing mission, Gavin was ordered to another air base on an errand. There were no Jeeps available, but there was plenty of gasoline, so he borrowed a B-17.

Arriving at the base, he screamed out of the sky, flared out, kissed the tarmac three times, touched down, braked hard, and pulled a sharp right onto the taxiway, nearly clipping the hangar with his port wing. “He loved to do that,” said our son. “He loved to come in like Top Gun when everybody was watching.”

The tower came on the intercom. “Pilot,” it said, “either fly that thing or park it.”

Gavin wheeled around on the taxiway and gunned the engine. The B-17 rose in a graceful arc twenty feet above the ground, crossed two runways, and touched down on the taxiway on the other side of the field. “Pilot,” said the tower, “you wait right there.”

A gangly man emerged from the tower and headed toward the B-17. Gavin didn’t say what he felt as he saw him approach. Had he recognized the famous stuttery drawl through the intercom’s crackle? Or was it a surprise to see this honest-to-god, larger-than-life war hero with features resembling his own storming across the tarmac toward him? “Grandpa used to say, ‘Jimmy Stewart reamed me a new one that day,’” said our son. “He loved that story.”

Later, after the war, when Gavin was framing tract houses in Pasadena, he ran into Jimmy Stewart, or so he said. He didn’t say if they stared at each other, or shook hands, or went out for a beer.

He loved his wife and stepchildren and was a hero to many.

As he moved through his seventies, Gavin told these stories more often and with more relish. Vernice always listened with attention, and we followed her example, registering surprise, awe, amusement, reverence at the right moments.

Did we believe him? Does it matter? “Just flying bombers over Germany and surviving—that’s heroic enough,” our son said. “He didn’t need to embellish anything.”

But I guess he did.  A need is a weakness, and the more desperate the need, the more poignant the weakness. To offer his need so nakedly to us, his audience, to show such vulnerability in telling us these stories about his invulnerability—surely that, too, takes guts.

GAIL WELLS is an essayist, science writer and scientific editor who lives in Corvallis, Oregon.  Her most recent book is The Little Lucky: A Family Geography (OSU Press, 2007)