I was a lucky girl. I grew up in a family of people who not only loved one another but who also told one another this frequently. I especially remember a moment when my older brother, Jay, and I, both in our 20s, on a vacation with our parents, were sitting on a beach drinking gin and tonics at sunset. Jay was, among other things, a natural comedian and had just done a riotous imitation of Mel Brooks’s 2000 Year Old Man. We were crying with laughter. When we pulled ourselves together, my mom made a toast. “Here’s to us,” she said. “We love each other, and we know it.”

My brother was my hero and my best friend. Ever since I could remember, Jay wanted to fly. When he was little, he had wallpaper in his bedroom with airplanes all over it. He got mad at me once for fiddling around with the planes he had constructed out of wood and glue. “Look out — you’ll wreck them!” he said. I didn’t understand his passion for flying, but I respected it. After high school, he was accepted at the U.S. Naval Academy, in Annapolis. I thought he could do absolutely anything. A lot of other people seemed to think he could, too. A friend of his recently told me, “We all figured Jay would be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff one day, at the very least.”

He graduated from the academy, reported to Pensacola, Florida, for flight school, and was eventually sent to the naval air station in Kingsville, Texas, for advanced training. Soon the first part of his dream came true: He earned his wings. After qualifying to fly the F-8 fighter, Jay was assigned to a squadron of attack jets on the USS Forrestal and was deployed to the Mediterranean. He ultimately became a flight commander.

Flying, for Jay, was like breathing for someone else. He couldn’t get enough of it. Of course he knew the risks. But I don’t think he and his fellow officers talked a lot about the danger. They were focused on doing their jobs, supporting one another. Actually, none of us really wanted to think too much about the danger. We didn’t want it to have any power over us. Ignoring it seemed to be the best plan. Yet the awareness and the concern were always with us.