He Invented an Airline in His Head — Now His Family Holds Every Giggle Tight

The stories his family tells are never the big ones. They are the too-big jeans. On Christmas Day 2023, Benjamin Vo stands in a room strung with garland and holds up a brand-new pair of jeans that are comically, hilariously too large for him. He is grinning. A family member laughs beside him, still elbow-deep in a box of wrapping paper. Nobody photographs that moment because it matters. They photograph it because it is Tuesday-shaped joy. Now it is one of the most valuable objects his family owns. Ben died on June 13, 2026, of leukemia. He was fifteen. Eight weeks later, at a Mass prayed in his memory, a priest reached for the story his family tells most: the airline. Ben invented one. He called it con chim airlines. He would talk about it and his whole face would light up — gentle giggles, ideas spilling out, a boy whose mind could genuinely soar while his spirit stayed humble and sweet. He built games. He built apps. He built aviation galleries. In his own words, he was "just doing computers." The homilist set that next to the day's Gospel, where the disciples are bickering about which of them is greatest and Jesus quietly puts a child in the middle of them. "Unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the Kingdom of heaven." And next to Ezekiel, handed a scroll covered in words of sorrow, who eats it and says: it was as sweet as honey in my mouth. His father has been telling stories too. There is one about a phone call from Ben's IEP teacher, saying she was going to promote him out of the program — he was no longer speech delayed. He could talk. "You listened to her, you respected her," his dad remembers. "You were an angel." The photographs read like any family's, which is the point. Two brothers in scout uniforms outside Phở 54 on a bright November afternoon, Ben's yellow neckerchief neatly tied, his younger brother standing quiet beside him. A selfie indoors in baseball caps, Ben throwing a peace sign in a grey hoodie in a red fleece. Two boys in áo dài at their grandparents' house for Tết, supposed to be offering New Year wishes, mostly wrestling. A burger held up under a thatched roof in summer 2023. Lasagna with his dad in July 2025, braces showing, silver cross at his neck. Alpine hills and mountain chalets in August 2025, cap on, red shirt, standing tall between his dad and his brother. And one from years earlier: a small boy in an oversized dress shirt, a striped tie and a dark hat, holding a chalkboard sign that reads I ❤ YOU DAD. His family has also found a strange, steadying comfort in a friendship Ben never got to have on earth. Saint Carlo Acutis was a boy from Milan who loved computers and the Eucharist, who taught himself to code and built a website cataloguing Eucharistic miracles so others might believe. He died of leukemia at fifteen. In 2025 he became the first millennial declared a saint. Ben was still creating six weeks before he died of the same illness, at the same age. "It is hard not to see the hand of God in it," his family writes. Two boys who found God and found computers in the same breath. Two faithful teenagers called home young. They believe the two of them walk together now. On his memorial site, strangers keep lighting candles — 9,425 of them so far — and writing prayers, asking Ben to carry their intentions to God. "Ben — please pray for Grandpa," one reads. "We need grandpa strong!" "Ben — your brother is having such a hard time," another says. "Please guide him and help him." One commenter, writing in Vietnamese, told Ben he is at peace now in Heaven, the place kept for angels who carry gentleness and love, and that he will always be a wonderful older brother to — watching over him and lighting his way from there. Another, asking for a grandmother still in the hospital with pneumonia, simply requested that Ben ask Jesus to send a blessing over the family. And one is from his father, written on a plane: "Life is so short. I still can't believe that you're no longer here with us. Thanks for being my Son on this earth for 15 years. I hope to reunite with you forever in Heaven someday." The hardest thing anyone says about a loss like this is the truest: nothing his parents did or failed to do caused it. Not the house. Not a missed sign. Not a lack of prayer. Parents replay every choice hunting for the moment it became their fault, and there is no such moment. That searching is only love with nowhere left to go. Some children are called home early, and no one is owed a reason. What is left is the jeans, and the neckerchief, and the peace sign, and an airline that only ever existed in a fifteen-year-old's imagination — and that his family will now carry forever. The hosts of Remembering Benjamin sit with these stories, and with the prayers written for Ben, on the podcast.