Gabby

by Gabrielle Giffords

  I’d kid her. “So what did you do? Did you put on your boots? Did you get back in your pickup truck? When did you start changing tires? The next day?”

  But Gabby knew what she was doing. She knew how her words and her story resonated. She had almost pitch-perfect instincts for politics, and for people’s needs and dreams. She won that election by 12 percentage points.

  Her victory speech on the night of November 7, 2006, still viewable on YouTube, shows Gabby at her best. She was charismatic and poised, ready to start the job. She looked like a young woman who was going not just to Congress, but maybe to places beyond.

  “I’m humbled by the support you’ve given me and the confidence you’ve granted me,” she told the cheering crowd at Tucson’s Doubletree Hotel. She thanked those who voted for her, “not just the Democrats, but the independents, the Republicans, the Greens, the libertarians, the vegetarians.” That was pure Gabby, giving a shout-out to the vegetarians.

  She saluted Arizona political legends who’d come before her, including the late, longtime congressman Mo Udall. They’d shown her, she said, that she’d need to have “a gut to tackle the tough problems and the chutzpah to be able to stand up and say it like it is.”

  Jim Kolbe, the outgoing Republican congressman, was kind enough to stop by the celebration, and after thanking him for his decades of service, she brought him onstage and hugged him.

  She vowed she would not go to Washington as an ideologue. “In my TV ads, you saw that there are some lines I just won’t cross,” she said. “But there is one line I will never be afraid to cross. I will always extend my hands across the aisle to do what’s right for the American people, to build consensus, and to get the job done.”

  I watched how Gabby ended her eight-minute speech. It was almost like she was shouting out her own countdown, and she was about to be launched right to Washington.

  “I’m ready to roll up my sleeves,” she said, “to work hard for our troops now serving in Iraq.

  “I’m ready to roll up my sleeves to get to work for the children in our country, who deserve the best schools, the best education.” The cheering almost drowned her out.

  “I’m ready to roll up my sleeves for those of us who live in border regions and who deserve a practical solution to a complicated problem.

  “I’m ready to roll up my sleeves and get to work for future generations who deserve to inherit a planet as beautiful and extraordinary as the planet that all of us were born into!”

  When the cheering subsided, she was more pensive. “We have a lot of work to do,” she said. “I just want to thank each and every one of you for making tonight possible. And I’m ready to get to work for all of us.”

  She left the podium and I hugged her only briefly, knowing there were so many others in the room who wanted to shake her hand or hug her themselves.

  Five years later, she’d be a woman taking baby steps through a torturous recovery. But on that night, so ready to roll up her sleeves, she had the stride of a giant.

  CHAPTER NINE

  With This Ring

  Gabby always loved playing with my wedding ring. After we got married, we’d go out to dinner by ourselves and hold hands across the table. At almost every meal, she’d slip the ring off my finger and move it from her thumb to her forefinger to her middle finger. It was her little ritual, her way of fidgeting.

  I understood it.

  Gabby loved being married. She had waited until she was thirty-seven before settling down, and having gone all those years without a wedding band, she enjoyed the way her hand felt now that she had two rings at her disposal—hers and mine.

  Her ring is a lapis-studded gold band with an inscription inside it, and Gabby was very touched when she first read the words I’d chosen to press against her finger: “You’re the closest to heaven that I’ve ever been.” I meant it as the ultimate compliment, considering that I’d already flown more than 10 million miles in space.

  Gabby wouldn’t take off her own ring to play with it. But my tungsten ring, larger and looser, was like a favorite toy in her hands, something she’d borrowed from her closest playmate.

  From the day we got married, she was drawn to my ring. She still is.

  On January 13, 2011, five days after Gabby was shot, I was sitting with her in her hospital room, holding her left hand with my left hand. She had opened her eyes very briefly the day before, but she still remained in a mostly comatose state. She made no sounds. She hardly moved. We didn’t know if she’d make it back at all.

  But then, suddenly, as she held my hand, she recognized something familiar. I could feel her fingertips exploring my ring, and then, despite seeming as if she was unconscious, she actually pulled the ring off and began to move it around in her fingers, just like always. She easily moved it from one of her fingers to the next for the next five minutes. She didn’t drop it once.

  Her eyes remained closed, tubes were everywhere, but she was somehow able to direct the fingers of her one good hand to rediscover her old pastime. I was more than surprised. I was overwhelmed. For the first time since she was shot, I felt as if I had a clear reason for hope. “She’s still Gabby,” I thought. “She’s going to pull out of this.”

  After she returned the ring to me, I had to tell her doctors. I called them into her room and tried to move the ring from one of my fingers to the next, one-handed, just as Gabby had done. I didn’t have the dexterity to do it. I ended up dropping the ring.

  By then, Gabby had returned to the stillness of her comatose state. But the doctors told me that her performance with the ring was a hugely encouraging sign.

  Every day after that, I’d hold Gabby’s hand, and she continued to take off my ring and play with it. At that point, she was unable to speak, and she didn’t seem as if she understood much of what anyone said to her. And yet she’d move that ring up and down my finger, and then onto her fingers, and then she’d place it back where it belonged, on my hand. It was a lifeline for her. And for me, too.

  Gabby and I were married on November 10, 2007, and my ring actually went missing just before we said our vows. The evening ceremony was outdoors at an organic-produce farm thirty-five miles south of Tucson, and our ringbearer was the four-year-old son of one of my fellow astronauts.

  The kid was named Laurier in memory of our friend Laurel Clark, an astronaut who was killed in 2003, when space shuttle Columbia disintegrated on reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. I understood the sentiment behind this, but I also thought Laurier was too close to “A Boy Named Sue” for a kid growing up in Texas. We all know how that story ended; I pictured this poor kid showing up at school and getting his ass kicked. I did him a favor and gave him the nickname “Buster” before he was born.

  Anyway, as our wedding approached, I had some concerns about our choice of ringbearer. Buster was a good kid, but I thought he may have been too young and not capable of making it down the aisle without incident. “What if he drops the ring?” I asked his mother.

  “He won’t drop the ring,” she assured me.

  Sure enough, he dropped the ring in the grass right before he needed to hand it over to us. Three hundred guests were left rustling and giggling while my brother and Buster’s mom looked for it. It seemed like five minutes before they found it.

  It didn’t matter. Our wedding was such an eclectic mix of people, customs, cultures, and unconventional touches that a renegade ring-bearer just added to the festivities.

  Gabby, of course, was the mastermind of the whole event. Though long retired from the role of “Annie,” she still liked to put on a show. She didn’t need or want a lavish wedding. But she loved the idea of making the wedding a statement about our roots, our personalities, and the causes that mattered to us.

  She arranged for a “low-carbon-footprint” wedding and tried to make everything recyclable or reusable. The utensils and plates were made of biodegradable sugarcane and cornstarch. Flower arrangements were homemade, and wedding favors were simple jars of hone
y from the Santa Cruz River valley. “I’m trying to tread lightly on this Earth,” Gabby explained to people when they asked how the planning was going. “I’m looking for ways to minimize the impact of the wedding.”

  Gabby decided to borrow a Vera Wang gown from the daughter of Suzy Gershman, her wedding planner. She liked that I would be wearing my formal dress Navy uniform, also white and reusable.

  Gabby’s mom, Gloria, came up with the idea for our wedding invitation. In Mexico, Spain, Germany, and Italy, when something wonderful or miraculous happens, there’s a tradition that a small painting, a “retablo,” is created describing it. People hang it in their church, giving thanks. In Mexico, one popular and humorous version of such a painting features a dashing young man, a sombrero in one hand and flowers in the other, courting a lovely woman in a courtyard. She sits on a bench with a shawl on her shoulders, her head turned toward the man. The image of a saint is in a nearby tree, looking over them. But the painting also contains some tension. Around the corner is a man with a gun in his hand, undoubtedly the young woman’s father, ready to chase the male suitor away.

  Gabby and Gloria thought it would be amusing if they used this painting on the top flap of the invitation. With Photoshop, they removed the father’s hair so he’d look more like Gabby’s balding dad, Spencer. And the woman in the courtyard, originally a brunette, was turned into a blonde so she’d look more like Gabby. (I nixed Gloria’s idea of putting a NASA patch on the man’s jacket. NASA is careful about the use of its logos and designs. I’d become sensitive about the minutiae that could earn an astronaut a trip to the front office.)

  At the time, not all of our guests knew what to make of this image. They just figured, correctly, that it was Gabby and her artistic mother doing something creative that reflected “borderland” culture. Looking at that invitation in retrospect, of course, yields a different impression, as if it foreshadowed what was to come. The painting now feels stark and troubling. A man and a woman have fallen in love, that’s obvious, but their relationship is being threatened by a hairless, sinister-looking man holding a gun.

  The farm we rented for the wedding was called Agua Linda, and Gabby thought the setting she chose for the ceremony was perfect: a mesquite-covered lawn with the Santa Rita Mountains behind us. The food she ordered from Las Vigas, a local restaurant, was a regional Mexican-American mix of steak, potatoes, and made-on-the-spot tortillas.

  Our wedding party was a little different in that each of us had a member of the opposite sex among our attendants. Gabby’s friend Raoul stood up for her—a bridesmaid in a suit—along with three of her friends, her sister, and my daughters, Claudia and Claire. Three of my four groomsmen were astronauts, including my brother and Buster’s mom, a groomsman in a dress. I also asked Mark Baden to stand up for me. He was the guy who dared me to steal that Saudi flag, and he later became a Navy A-6 Intruder pilot, like me, and then a pilot for United Airlines. We all walked down the aisle accompanied by the music of a mariachi band.

  It was also important to Gabby that we be married in a Jewish ceremony.

  She was raised as the product of a mixed marriage; Spencer, a Jew, and Gloria, a Christian Scientist, had encouraged their daughters to make their own decisions about faith. By the time Gabby reached young adulthood, she had fully embraced her Jewish background. She even had a formal naming ceremony in which she took the Hebrew name Gabriella, which means “God is my strength.”

  She’d gone to Israel for the first time in 2001 and described the visit as “life-changing.” The journalists and politicians on the trip with her said she asked more questions than anyone, and she came away feeling a kinship with Israelis. She was especially taken with the Jewish concept of tzedakah, which speaks to our obligations to be charitable.

  Though she cast her lot with the Jewish people, Gabby being Gabby, she remained curious and open-minded about other religions. She took a liking to the Catholic priest who was the chaplain of the U.S. House of Representatives. She wanted us to go to him for premarital counseling.

  “Let me get this straight,” I said to her. “You want me to go to marriage counseling with a guy who has never had a relationship with a woman in his life?”

  “Well, it’s only ten classes,” she said.

  “Ten classes? In Washington? How am I going to get from Houston to Washington for ten classes?”

  “Maybe we can do it by video conference,” Gabby said.

  We met with the chaplain, a very nice man. I thought I could talk him into giving us the abbreviated version of marital counseling, but he wouldn’t go for it. He also wanted to see us in person. We had to back out.

  Gabby still liked the idea of counseling, though, so she turned to her rabbi at Congregation Chaverim, the Reform temple in Tucson where she is a member. Rabbi Stephanie Aaron has an interesting backstory. She was born Catholic, converted to Judaism after marrying a Jewish man, later divorced him, became a rabbi, then married a different Jewish man. Gabby really liked her, and I thought maybe a rabbi with this background would understand where I was coming from as a Catholic marrying a Jew. From her own life, Rabbi Aaron knew about divorce and finding love on a second try. I also appreciated that she didn’t ask us to commit to ten sessions. We ended up meeting with her a couple of times, and it went fine. She agreed to conduct our wedding ceremony.

  Just before our ceremony, we signed our katubah, which in essence is a Jewish marriage contract. Gabby had asked me to write the vows for the document, and this is what I’d come up with: “We pledge to love, respect, and support each other. We shall endeavor to be understanding, and will work hard to build a strong and loving family, a family that fills a home (or three) with laughter. We will help each other with our wishes, dreams and goals.

  “We will support each other as we navigate this world, and will try our best to leave it a better place than we found it, a place that is more good than bad, more light than dark. As friends, we promise to be honest, forgiving, and devoted to each other. We will share whatever wisdom we may possess, and will grow together on this incredible journey of marriage and life.”

  After the katubah signing, it was time for the wedding ceremony.

  We were married on a cool desert evening under the traditional chuppah, a canopy that in Judaism symbolizes the home we’d create and the children we might bring into our lives together. When the ceremony ended, we kissed and then walked back down the aisle as the mariachi band played the Hebrew folk song “Hava Nagila.”

  My military comrades had arranged a traditional “saber arch,” in which officers in formal dress honor a bride and groom by holding up swords or sabers. They did a good job with it, positioning their swords with tips nearly touching and blades up, as Gabby and I walked hand-in-hand underneath. They were joined by Laurier/Buster, the ring boy, who held a toy sword. It was something of a surreal scene—a Jewish wedding with military touches and a mariachi band providing the soundtrack.

  Marc Winkelman, a Texas businessman and our good friend, was one of the four people we honored as a chuppah pole-holder during the ceremony. As he mingled afterward, Marc couldn’t stop smiling, and he was struck by the fact that the other guests—astronauts, politicians, Navy guys, my old buddies from New Jersey, Gabby’s friends from Tucson—all had similar expressions on their faces. “Everyone was smiling from ear to ear,” Marc later told us. “There was just so much love and affection in the air.”

  The reception was held in the courtyard of the hacienda, and the evening’s emcee was Robert Reich, a very funny friend of ours best known as President Clinton’s secretary of labor. Bob and Gabby had met years earlier when she spent time at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

  When Bob raised his glass for a toast, he alluded to the pace of our crazy lives. Gabby, a member of the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees, returned from a visit to Iraq just days before the wedding. In a week’s time, she’d gone from power suits on Capitol Hill to camouflage and body armor in
Baghdad to a borrowed white dress in Arizona. As for me, I was deep into training for my third shuttle mission. We were so overwhelmed with responsibilities that our honeymoon had to be postponed indefinitely.

  Bob concluded his toast by saying, “To a bride who moves at a velocity that exceeds that of anyone else in Washington, and to a groom who moves at a velocity that exceeds seventeen thousand miles per hour.”

  Gabby and I sat together, her hand on mine, as Bob spoke. We were both moving at zero miles an hour, not our usual pace, but we felt completely content.

  On the day Gabby was shot, before I arrived at the hospital to see her, my mind raced with all kinds of terrible thoughts. But even in that early chaos, there was a moment when our wedding vows came into my head. We had promised to be faithful partners “in sickness and in health, in good times and bad . . .”

  I wasn’t sure how I’d find Gabby that day, but I expected the worst, and I knew our future had changed forever. “So this is what those vows mean,” I thought.

  In the months that followed, I often told Gabby, “I’m here for you. We’re a team.” That’s what we had promised each other when we exchanged wedding rings—to be there for each other in the worst of times.

  Though she couldn’t fully articulate it, I knew Gabby often felt like a burden. I’d remind her that she had been there for me in my times of need. After my brother was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2007, I figured that as his twin, I’d better get myself checked. Sure enough, I had it, too.

  Gabby came with me to my doctors’ appointments, she searched the Internet for medical information, and she kept on me to get second opinions. In 2008, after a mission in space, I elected to have surgery to remove my prostate. In the months that followed, I coped with all the troubling side effects familiar to prostate cancer patients, from incontinence to sexual dysfunction. The urologist had me taking Viagra every day for more than a year, and I even had to regularly give myself very unpleasant injections in very private places.