“Wow!” Gabby said.
I could see the wheels turning through the haze in her head. It was almost as if she were thinking, “What happened to my life? I open my eyes and out of nowhere a former president is standing in front of me.” She looked around the room, perhaps wondering if Jimmy Carter would be coming out of the closet.
President Bush sat next to Gabby for fifteen minutes, holding her left hand. It was very touching to watch. “You’ve been so strong,” he told her. “I’m really proud of you. And I’m praying for your recovery.”
“Chicken,” Gabby replied. “Chicken.”
This was one of those early days, when that was still the most frequent word on Gabby’s lips. No matter what she was trying to say, that was the word that came out. “Chicken.”
“Why does she keep saying that?” Mrs. Bush asked.
“We don’t know,” I told her. “Doctors can’t really explain why patients get stuck on certain words.”
Gabby was struggling with aphasia, an impairment of the ability to remember words, to speak, and to write. But she was also coping with perseveration, the repetition of words and phrases, which is common among people with brain injuries.
When the visit ended, I didn’t think the Bushes would speed home and call Republican headquarters with insights into Gabby’s condition. The former president is now beyond politics, beyond partisanship. I could see that. He was just a veteran of public service who knew the risks of the job and wanted to show his concern.
Gabby was appreciative when she was visited by public figures such as the Bushes, but because she wasn’t communicating well, I’d sometimes see frustration and embarrassment on her face. She was a woman who used to be able to get dressed fast and look great, a woman who socialized easily and winningly. I knew it was hard for her to feel so deficient and exposed.
She was more comfortable during visits with old friends, especially Raoul Erickson. He’s a forty-three-year-old free spirit who runs a business in Tucson designing and repairing electronic equipment. Extremely bright and unafraid to be unorthodox, he always reminded me of a younger version of Doc Brown from Back to the Future. Gabby had gotten to know him fifteen years earlier when he’d shown up at El Campo Tire to fix the company’s computer system. A siblinglike friendship blossomed from there.
Raoul is the ultimate go-to friend. As Gabby’s mom puts it, if you need a rattlesnake relocated, your car pulled out of a ditch, or Wi-Fi installed in your house, he’s the guy you call, and he shows up eager and able to help. He’s there if you want to have fun, too. It was Raoul who’d gone on that long bike ride with Gabby the evening before she was shot.
The first time Raoul flew down from Tucson to visit Gabby in Houston, she was thrilled to see him. “Christmas, best ever!” she said cheerily. It was likely that she meant to say something along the lines of: “It’s great that you’re here, Raoul!” But those unintended words about Christmas were what came out of her mouth. It didn’t really matter. Her exuberance while greeting him was clear.
Being with Raoul, Gabby could connect with her best memories of Tucson—her active and athletic life there, her career before Congress, her most-cherished haunts. Gabby and Raoul didn’t have to reminisce or even trade any words. They could just be together, and Gabby felt more like herself. I saw that.
I was very grateful that Raoul was willing to spend so much time with Gabby, especially because I was caught up in training for my mission. When he visited, he often ate meals with Gabby in her room at TIRR. Gabby’s right hand remained in her lap, totally still, as she held her fork with her left. Like Gabby, Raoul is right-handed, but he decided to leave his right hand in his lap, too. Eating with his left hand was a show of solidarity that Gabby appreciated. When she first noticed, she acknowledged his empathetic gesture by touching his left hand with hers and smiling at him. Then the two new lefties continued eating in silence.
Before her injury, Gabby was diligent about trying to avoid all processed food. Raoul had turned her on to eating natural products, and with his encouragement, she was always reading the labels on food packaging. That continued even after she was injured, though I’m not sure she could make sense of the ingredients she was reading about, or that she was able to decipher the fine print with her damaged eyes. She’d frequently have to cover or close one eye to read those labels, or she’d alternate from one eye to the other.
Raoul saw that Gabby didn’t like a lot of the hospital food—she’d make that clear by pushing it away—so he’d smuggle in things he knew she’d eat, such as Greek yogurt, fresh fruit, vegetables, and salads.
Raoul had an intuitive sense about Gabby, and he recognized that when she was feeling depressed, she often didn’t have much of an appetite. “Eating is part of the healing process,” Raoul told her. “You’ve got to eat. You’ll heal faster and get out of here faster. And you’ve got to stay positive. That’s really important.”
In her own chosen words, Gabby kept telling Raoul—and the rest of us, too—that she wanted to leave the hospital. “Fly away home,” she’d say. “Fly away!”
The imagery of that, as if Gabby could rise from her wheelchair and fly off like a bird, was so poignant to us. When Raoul was on duty, his answer was often the same: “Well, let’s be positive and you’ll fly out of here faster.”
They’d continue sitting together, Gabby picking at her food, and a few minutes later, she’d reflect on his advice. “Positive,” she’d say, almost to him but more to herself. It was as if she were trying to shrug off her sadness and her urge to cry. A few more bites of food. “Positive. Positive.”
Even when Gabby wasn’t greeting visitors at the hospital, it was as if she had unexpected company. Letters and e-mails came in every day from well-wishers: strangers, constituents, die-hard Democrats, die-hard Republicans, people who’d recovered from brain injuries, and well-meaning people offering therapeutic advice. A boy in Arizona sold his toys for $2.85 and sent it along so Gabby would have lunch money. A woman from Florida sent Gabby her very own “Astronaut Barbie,” which included the tag line “First stilettos on the moon!” The woman wrote: “The adage is ‘the sky is the limit,’ but certainly not in your case.”
Gabby also heard from almost everyone she’d ever known earlier in her life. Her mom, Gloria, would sit with her reading these letters from friends and acquaintances, stopping to interject her own comments or flashes of memory. Gabby seemed to enjoy the reminiscing, even though she couldn’t articulate her own recollections.
A lot of the letter-writers described their impressions of her back when she was younger. It was as if they felt a need to remind her about the kind of person she was, and the traits they admired in her before she was injured. She heard from a long-lost cousin, now teaching in China, and from her long-ago Brownie troop leader. A friend from college recalled Gabby’s “tenacity, wit and strength as a listener,” and how people viewed her as a one-of-a-kind woman on campus, “always rehabilitating old Vespa scooters and motorcycles.” Gabby was pretty handy as a mechanic.
Bob Gardner, a former El Campo Tire employee now living in Virginia, described his initial thought when he heard that Gabby, the boss’s twenty-six-year-old daughter, would be taking over the business: “To me, that meant a spoiled, snot-nosed kid would be going through the motions of running the company, asking questions, getting in the way of everyone while we did the real work.” He wrote of how shocked and impressed he was when Gabby insisted on learning every position in the company “including busting tires, loading trucks and running the front counter.”
In Bob’s letter to Gabby, he also recalled the first day he met her: “I walked into the main office and was startled to find a petite, young, beautiful woman in sweats and tennis shoes, sitting on the counter. You were fully engaged in reading ‘Modern Tire’ as I stammered ‘hello.’ You jumped to your feet and cheerfully introduced yourself, ‘Hi, I’m Gabby!’ You quickly made me feel comfortable as you explained your background and asked about min
e. We spent a half-hour getting to know each other. You made me feel like you were truly interested in me and my future with the company.”
As Gloria read the letter, Gabby remembered Bob. “Yes, yes, yes!”
She didn’t say it, but she surely knew it. Bob was the manager of El Campo’s store on North Oracle, the street where she would hold her ill-fated Congress on Your Corner event.
Like many letters from Gabby’s old friends and acquaintances, Bob’s ended with optimism: “I’m sorry you have to go through these hard times, but I feel assured that your recovery will be quick and complete, and it won’t be long before you are back where you belong, in Washington, D.C., and Tucson, representing the people who love you.”
Day after day, Gabby listened as her mother read letter after letter. It was as if people from her past were coming to life in her hospital room, encouraging her to reclaim herself. Gabby grinned at the good memories. But at times, I’d also see sadness on her face. She’d close her eyes.
“Fly away home,” she’d say. “Fly away.”
Looking back, Gabby’s life has been defined by a series of unexpected detours. She always felt that her quirky, nonlinear path through early adulthood made her stronger, more curious, more self-possessed, and more aware of the needs and yearnings of different people in a variety of cultures. She was all at once an intellectual, a businesswoman, a tire-changer, a community advocate, a lone horseback rider, a cowgirl, an art-and-music aficionado, a biker chick, and a fledgling politician. She took steps toward becoming a sociologist, an anthropologist, a divinity student, and a farmer.
When Gabby and I were dating and I began learning her life story, I realized she was like no one I had ever met. She was ten different women combined. She had been engaged by everything!
It wasn’t that she was striving to be a renaissance woman. It was that all her varied interests couldn’t be contained. She described it as “a kind of lunacy,” but also thought her journey suited her perfectly.
After high school, Gabby attended tiny Scripps College in Claremont, California, and she’d later tell me that her education there was a great gift, largely because it was an all-female institution. “Boys in classrooms dominate the conversations, especially in math and science,” she said. She felt that she nurtured her self-confidence and polished her ability to speak up by asserting herself in those all-girl classes. She wondered if she would have ended up running for Congress had she spent her college years sitting quietly in classrooms, waiting for the boys to finish talking. At Scripps she could be silly, serious, opinionated, whatever. She could figure out who she was.
Gabby loved the words of Ellen Browning Scripps, who founded the college in 1926. The school’s mission was to develop in students “the ability to think clearly and independently, and to live confidently, courageously and hopefully.”
An ambivalent math student in high school, Gabby discovered a passion for calculus at Scripps. Though she was interested in many subjects, she finally settled on a double major in Latin American studies and sociology. Meanwhile, outside the classroom, she began to realize how crucial it was for her to sort out her own feelings about public policy and public service.
While I was a twenty-six-year-old combat pilot in the thick of Operation Desert Storm, following orders, Gabby was a twenty-year-old student at Scripps, standing on the fringes of peace demonstrations and angry student rallies. She wasn’t a knee-jerk pacifist, shouting slogans. She wanted to better understand why we’d gone to war, so she’d stay up late into the night watching coverage of the fighting, or reading about the politics and Iraqi actions that led to it.
Gabby was no pushover. She came from the Wild West, remember, and walked the campus in cowboy boots. Behind her sweet smile was a tough broad, especially if someone messed with her. She’d speak her mind.
She once took a course about minority women in literature. She was the only white student in the class, and the African-American instructor wasn’t very welcoming to her. “This course is for women of color,” she said to Gabby.
Gabby answered, “I am a woman of color. I’m just a lighter color.”
Gabby was also more fearless than the average student at Scripps. When she wasn’t riding Buckstretcher, the horse she’d brought to college, she’d tool around campus on her Vespa. Then it was stolen, and the thief had the audacity to advertise it for sale. Gabby found out where the scooter was being stored, used a chain-cutter to free it, and stole it back. If the thief had come by to confront her, she’d have just kept cutting. She understood a thing or two about frontier justice.
After graduating from Scripps in 1993, Gabby drove off in her Ford pickup with one of her motorcycles, a German model from 1946, strapped into the bed. As soon as she reached Tucson, she enrolled in summer school at the University of Arizona, studying economics.
I once asked her why she did that. “I thought that maybe I could become a really smart farmer and solve world hunger,” she said. “I was thinking big.”
That overly ambitious urge passed, and she instead applied for a Fulbright scholarship to study the eighty thousand “Old Colony” Mennonites in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. She was accepted and received a grant for a one-year academic adventure.
Gabby immersed herself in the Mennonite community, living with them in their homes, without electricity or indoor plumbing, and asking countless questions about their conservative views and their commitment to nonviolence. She compiled data on their fertility and mortality rates, and took a special interest in those who strayed from the faith, which she jokingly referred to as “Mennonites gone bad.” When she was with them, Gabby wore their traditional clothing. In her long-sleeved Mennonite dress, with a brimmed hat and a tight scarf, she looked like someone from the 1800s.
Gabby later ended up at Cornell University, earning a master’s degree in regional planning. Her interest in the field was rooted in her love of Tucson. She had watched the surge in the city’s population and commercial development over the years, and saw the dangers of mismanaged growth. In 1996, that master’s degree helped her land a well-paying job in New York at Price Waterhouse, the top-tier accounting firm, where she consulted on the demographic impact of regional development. She was excited that her responsibilities included traveling to eleven Latin American countries.
Not long after she started that job, Gabby was called into her boss’s office. She’d been dressing in appropriate attire: mid-1990s power suits. Colleagues, however, were taking exception to her footwear. “This is Price Waterhouse and this is New York City,” the boss said. “You’ve got to stop wearing cowboy boots to work.” Fearing she’d lose the job, Gabby left the boots in her closet and tried to embrace East Coast urban life.
A part of her was hugely excited to be in New York. She’d later reminisce about her arrival there by saying: “It seemed like the beginning of a grand and glittering adventure in the big city: posh apartments, pointy-toed shoes, and maybe even my first martini.”
She wrote those words in 2009, during her second term in Congress, when she was asked to give the commencement speech at the Scripps College graduation. Gabby gave a lot of thought to that speech. She wanted the young graduates to know that the life we live isn’t always the life we plan, and to see the beauty in that. She was always telling me that she wanted to find ways to empower young women, and to that end, she wrote the commencement speech very carefully.
She told the graduates what happened to her when she was a few months into her new job in New York City: The phone rang and it was her father calling, saying he needed her to come home as soon as possible to take over the family tire stores. She’d have to resign from Price Waterhouse.
“This was completely unexpected and not at all in my cosmopolitan plans,” Gabby explained in her speech. “But inevitably, there comes a point in all of our lives where our role as the child begins to reverse with our parents. Our protectors now need protection. For some of us it comes while we are established in life, and
for others it may come while we are young. But whenever that call comes, we pick up the phone and we respond. In my case, it meant packing up my heels and putting on my cowboy boots, getting back into the same old Ford pickup truck and heading back west.”
She explained that her return to the family tire business in Tucson was the first step in a progression. “I learned the tire business from the ground up and also started to manage the company’s philanthropic aims, the part that tried to give back to the community that had been so generous to us through the years.
“I started to see things about southern Arizona that were not perfect and needed to change. So I ran for office determined to make that change and put right the things that were wrong, to represent those who didn’t have a voice. And I realized then and there what my heart was saying: that for me, the highest calling in my own life was service to others. I have not looked back since.”
She told the young women at the graduation a little about her journey, her long list of possible careers, her enthusiasm for offbeat adventures. She hoped her story would encourage them to be restless and creative, to step outside the lines. “You are blessed to be living in a country that gives its citizens the freedom to bump around the scenery a bit, to try new things and make mistakes and stretch your talents and make adjustments and to find every rich and satisfying thing, and it will still be OK in the end.
“Remember what the authors of the Declaration of Independence said about the inalienable rights of each person, which are ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ Think of that! These words are one of the deepest expressions of who we are as Americans. This is the mission statement of the United States. I hope you will choose to make it your mission statement as well.
“Pursue your passion, and everything will fall into place. This is not being romantic. This is the highest order of pragmatism.”
The tire business was certainly not Gabby’s first passion. And yet she embraced her job at El Campo with a commitment rooted in her passion to serve her family. She didn’t know it at the time, but her decision to help her father would put the rest of her life in order. It was the tire business that sparked an awareness of her in the Tucson community, which helped lead her to the Arizona legislature, which enabled her to reach the halls of Congress by age thirty-six.
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