Gabby was a stickler for other things, too. She didn’t like the girls putting their shoes on the couch, or up against the back of the front seat in the car. They didn’t like when she called them on it.
Gabby tried to be a positive influence for the girls, and sometimes she’d say things that got through to them. When Claudia was having trouble with a teacher and wanted to switch out of the class, Gabby told her, “All through your life, you’re going to find people you don’t like or who don’t like you. You just have to figure out a way to suck it up and deal with it.” Claudia found Gabby’s advice useful, and remained in the class.
Each year in mid-February, Gabby was always the first one looking ahead, asking, “What should the kids do this summer?” You could almost set your watch to the moment she’d start planning. She’d ask, “Should the girls go to camp? How about some sort of service organization? We need to figure out how they can have a productive summer.” Gabby suggested that Claudia consider a “wilderness” hiking expedition sponsored by the National Outdoor Leadership School. “You’ll learn a lot and it’ll be fun,” Gabby told her. “Just ask your dad.”
As an astronaut, I had gone on three trips with that organization. We spent several days backpacking while getting an education on expedition behavior, conflict resolution, and team building—stuff that’s important in space. Claudia did end up going twice on the teen version of that trip and she loved it.
Then, in the summer of 2010, Claudia went on a community service trip to Nicaragua, where she and other teens helped build retaining walls in poor villages. Claudia stayed with a villager and ten members of his extended family in a home with just three rooms and dirt floors. At night they’d sit around the kitchen table, under a lone light-bulb, peeling black beans to make meals for the next day. Claudia sat with them, peeling and listening. One night she’d have beans for dinner. The next night she’d have rice. Some nights, for variety, her hosts would serve beans and rice together.
This was just the sort of eye-opening adventure that appealed to Gabby, of course, and that made for common ground. “I once lived with the Mennonites in Mexico,” she told Claudia, and they talked for a while, comparing their experiences.
The girls, Gabby, and I did have some good times together. Claudia, Gabby, and I enjoyed hiking together to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Claire liked visiting Gabby’s parents, who live well outside of Tucson, in the middle of nowhere. We’d all go hiking out there, and when Claire complained that she was tired, Gabby was her cheerleader. “Come on, you can do it!” We’d struggle through the heat, the swarms of wasps and yellow jackets, the pokey cacti, and eventually reach a waterfall, where we’d eat lunch, and Gabby would tell Claire she was proud of her for not giving up.
Those moments were positive memories. But mostly, the girls weren’t interested in bonding with Gabby. And they didn’t.
“I understand,” Gabby said. “They’re kids and I love them. I’m patient. I’ll wait for them to come around.”
She continued to reach out. She’d buy them little gifts. She’d ask about their lives. She tried to have no expectations.
Then came January 8.
The girls had flown with me that day from Houston to Tucson. It was the first time they’d ever seen me cry. That afternoon, they visited Gabby—bandaged, battered, comatose—in her hospital room. They had never before seen anyone who was that close to death. It was shocking and scary, and they were both shaken.
Back at the hotel, just before midnight, Claudia was unable to sleep. She thought about how she had never allowed herself to get close to Gabby. She thought about the things she admired about her stepmother but had kept to herself. She wished she could go back in time and have a second chance. All she could do, through her tears, was to take out a piece of paper and start writing.
Dear Gabby,
You are the strongest, most incredible woman I have ever met. I love you so much. I am thankful to have someone like you in my life. I know we have not been extremely close in the past couple years and I am really sorry. That is going to change immediately.
I took such a wonderful person for granted and I feel horrible. I have been praying for you all day. I am going to visit as much as possible. Thank you for supporting me in everything I do and for believing in me. I can’t wait to see you again and give you the biggest hug and kiss ever. I can’t wait to hear your voice again. Stay strong. I love you. —Claudia
She rewrote the letter in neater handwriting and stuck the rough draft in her purse. She gave me the original, and weeks later, I read it to Gabby, who listened and nodded. Gabby was still in the early stages of her recovery, so she didn’t respond with words. But I sensed that she understood and appreciated Claudia’s efforts.
Claudia, meanwhile, kept that rough draft in her purse for months. She’d take it out several times each school day, just to reread it. It almost always made her teary.
She told her pole-vaulting coach that she was struggling with guilt. “I’m ashamed of how I acted before this all happened,” she said. The coach, Chad Hunt, offered perspective and advice. “Don’t punish yourself anymore,” he said. “You can’t think about what your relationship has been. You have to think about what your relationship with your stepmother is now, and what it’s going to be. That’s the only thing you can control.” (Claudia and Claire’s mom—my ex, Amy—also encouraged the girls to build new bonds with Gabby, for which I am grateful.)
Claudia chose never to discuss her letter with Gabby. She explained that she had made a decision: “I want to show her I’ve changed and that I care through my actions, not my words.” Among her friends, Claudia became an advocate for repairing relationships with parents and stepparents. “I took Gabby for granted for so long,” she’d say, “and I’m lucky I got a second chance to build a relationship with her.”
For her part, Claire continued to struggle with feelings of sadness and guilt. At age fourteen, she had difficulty understanding how this could happen. How could a madman attack someone she knew so well? How could something so bad happen to someone who tried so hard to improve the lives of others?
The Monday after the shooting, Claire returned to school. She was grateful for all the supportive text messages and Facebook postings her friends had left for her over the weekend, but she knew it would be a terribly hard day. She went to school promising herself she wouldn’t cry, but the tears came as soon as she arrived and embraced a good friend. Her first-period teacher, Mrs. May, whom Claire loved, gave her a hug when she got to class. One student asked why the teacher was hugging Claire, and another student blurted out, “Her mom got shot in the head!”
“That broke me,” Claire later said. “I had to leave the room, tears streaming down my face. I was an emotional mess.”
Another teacher gave Claire a box of tissues to carry with her from class to class. “I know Gabby would have wanted me to have a normal and productive day,” Claire decided, and through her tears, she tried to do just that.
In the months after the shooting, Claire was sad on another front. She didn’t like that I was unavailable for her, given how busy I was caring for Gabby and training for my space shuttle mission. “You have so much on your plate,” she told me. “I feel like there’s no room for me.”
Claire tried not to be resentful, but the changes in our lives after January 8 were very tough for her. All I could do was hug her, tell her I loved her, and promise that I’d try harder.
As Gabby’s recovery continued, she became more comfortable with the girls. She enjoyed when they came to see her. She told them “I love you.” But Claudia still wrestled with her emotions and her regrets. Like me, she was having dreams about Gabby’s full recovery. In my dreams, I was overjoyed that Gabby was almost back to normal. “Mine are more like nightmares,” Claudia said. “Gabby is fully recovered, but she doesn’t want a relationship with me. She can’t forgive me.”
She didn’t need to worry. I had no doubts that the relationship between Ga
bby and the girls would continue to blossom. I saw it happening day by day.
Meanwhile, our lives remained split between before and after.
There were little things the girls reflected on. Before the shooting, they knew that people sometimes described me and Gabby as a so-called power couple. If they typed “astronaut Mark Kelly” and then “Rep. Gabrielle Giffords” into the Google search engine, we both had a similar number of entries. We were each mentioned on websites here and there, but like a lot of ambitious B-listers, our online presence was fairly modest. After Gabby was injured, the number of entries about her on Google exceeded eight million. None of us could have predicted that Gabby would charge ahead on the Googling front because of such an anguishing event for our family and eighteen other families. But the Internet is a heartless inventory. It tallies entries, not grief. It hurt to think about Gabby’s mushrooming online presence.
My girls lost their innocence in the wake of the shooting. They grieved for the children of the other victims in Tucson, and for the parents and brother of Christina-Taylor Green, the nine-year-old girl who died that day. They saw how, in retrospect, our lives had been easy and idyllic. We didn’t fully know it, but we’d all been very lucky, and lucky to have each other. We see that clearly now.
As Claudia began looking at colleges, there were a few that rose to the top of her list. One was the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis. Another was the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she considered joining the ROTC program.
She liked the idea of U of A because she already had a network of family and friends there. While it was far from home, it was a place she’d find her dad, her stepmom, Gabby’s parents, and other familiar faces. She could hike with Gabby’s friend Raoul, or he could lend a hand if her car needed to be fixed. Another friend of Gabby’s, Nelson Miller, a retired Navy SEAL, would be there for Claudia if she needed help or guidance. And she knew Gabby would want to offer her advice on places to see, things to do, and people in Tucson to meet.
Just sixteen years old, Claudia had time before she’d have to make a decision. But she enjoyed contemplating that possible life in Tucson. She pictured herself biking the same Tucson trails that Gabby loved. It might be a long while before her stepmother could get back on a bike, if ever, but Claudia could take those rides and enjoy all the scenery. Then she and Gabby could talk about what she saw or who she met along the way. Claudia would enjoy that, and it lifted her heart to think that Gabby would, too.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Higher Callings
As Gabby fought for her life in the early days after the shooting, she had no idea that she was at the center of a boiling nationwide debate. Political discourse in America had become increasingly angry and belligerent, the rhetoric mean-spirited and threatening. The question of the moment: Had hateful, confrontational politics played a role in the shooting in Tucson?
Some argued that a troubled twenty-two-year-old man went to that shopping center to assassinate my wife and to murder and maim other innocent people solely because he was mentally ill. It wasn’t the influence of political rhetoric. It was schizophrenia.
Gabby couldn’t speak for herself after she was shot, but I knew exactly how she felt about the toxic political climate and the use of violent imagery in campaigns. She hated it. And she worried that some people, influenced by what they heard and read, could be motivated to respond with violence. She’d already seen it in her own congressional district, in her own office.
She was well aware that unstable people, like everyone else, watch the news, see campaign commercials, and seek information on the Internet. They are sometimes obsessive followers of politics. And because they may have a skewed way of processing information, it’s possible that angry, violent words could motivate them to do disturbing or terrible things. Gabby didn’t just talk to me about this risk. She also spoke publicly about it.
Especially during the debate over the controversial 2010 health-care bill, Gabby paid close attention to the threats and violence in other congressional districts. Pictures of nooses were sent to congressmen in Michigan and South Carolina. A New York congresswoman received a telephone message mentioning snipers, and a brick was thrown into her office. A shot was fired into a Virginia congressman’s campaign office.
For weeks leading up to the health-care vote, protesters had gathered outside Gabby’s office in Tucson, jeering loudly and angrily. They held nasty signs, including some that showed Gabby dressed as Death and carrying a scythe. Checking messages on the office answering machine, Gabby’s staffers would have to log calls such as: “Is that c—going to vote for the health-care bill?”
Some angry callers would demand to talk directly to Gabby. “Is that Communist bitch there?” more than one asked. Gabby’s staffers tried to remain cool. Her communications director, C. J. Karamargin, had an urge to answer, “Which Communist bitch are you looking for?”
Staffers joked about their efforts to sweet-talk “crazy callers,” but they were nervous, too. At times things felt sinister. During healthcare forums, C.J. thought the hostility “was rumbling like a volcano.” He wondered when the lava would flow. But he was struck by the ways in which Gabby worked to ease the tension. When people were rude at the forums, Gabby responded forcefully and firmly, but in a way that was quintessentially her. She wouldn’t scold or wag her finger. Instead she would cajole her audiences. “Hey, guys, let’s try not to be rude here, OK?”
Bill Clinton used to talk about himself as being like an inflatable clown; if you punched him, he came right back up. Gabby’s staffers said she reminded them of Clinton in that regard. She endured verbal blow after verbal blow, and she bounced right back up, trying to smile. “I’m here to listen,” she’d say. “I’m here to understand.”
When Gabby was alone with me, though, she spoke more candidly. Like her staffers, she felt the rumbles of the volcano and feared that it might blow.
She was troubled that her district was one of twenty targeted on Sarah Palin’s Facebook page and website, Sarahpac.com. Gabby understood that politics is a rough game. But she was taken aback by the image on Palin’s website. It featured a United States map with gun sights over the districts where Sarah Palin hoped her supporters would defeat Democrats who had supported President Obama’s health-care plan. The headline was “We’ve diagnosed the problem . . . Help us prescribe the solution.” Palin also sent out a Twitter message—“Don’t Retreat, Instead—RELOAD!”—encouraging her followers to visit her Facebook page.
Gabby told me that Palin’s rhetoric had no place in political discourse. “It sends all the wrong messages,” she’d say. “It’s a dangerous thing to do.”
In March 2010, a few hours after Gabby voted to approve the healthcare overhaul, someone shot out the glass door and side window of her office. Police suspected a pellet gun was used, though the perpetrator was never caught. That, more than anything up to that point, was distressing for Gabby’s staffers. They feared for their safety.
After the attack on her office, Gabby was invited to go on MSNBC to talk about it. One of the interviewers, Chuck Todd, asked her, “Are you fearful today?”
“You know, I’m not,” Gabby answered. “We have had hundreds and hundreds of protesters over the course of the last several months . . . The rhetoric is incredibly heated, not just the calls, but the e-mails, the slurs.”
Rather than talk about fear, Gabby wanted to appeal to people’s better instincts and ideals. “You’ve got to think about it,” she said. “Our democracy is a light, a beacon really, around the world, because we effect change at the ballot box and not because of these, you know, outbursts of violence.”
Gabby didn’t want to make this a partisan issue. She mentioned that she had seen “extreme activism” and efforts to inflame emotions among both Democrats and Republicans. “I think it’s important for all leaders, not just leaders of the Republican party or the Democratic party, to say, ‘Look, we can’t stand for this.’”
During t
hat interview, Gabby decided to mention her feelings about the Sarah Palin website. “For example, we’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list. But the thing is, the way she has it depicted has crosshairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they’ve got to realize the consequences to that action.”
Todd pointed out that “in fairness, campaign rhetoric and war rhetoric have been interchangeable for years.” He asked Gabby if she thought Palin really intended to suggest violence.
Gabby held her ground. “You know, I can’t say. I’m not Sarah Palin. But what I can say is that in the years that some of my colleagues have served—twenty, thirty years—they’ve never seen it like this. We have to work out our problems by negotiating, working together, hopefully Democrats and Republicans. I understand that this health-care bill is incredibly personal, probably the most significant vote cast here for decades, frankly. But the reality is that we’ve got to focus on the policy, focus on the process. Leaders—community leaders, not just political leaders—need to stand back when things get too fired up and say, ‘Whoa, let’s take a step back here.’”
On the day Gabby was shot, Sarah Palin’s rhetoric came quickly into my head. In fact, when President Obama called that afternoon to offer his help and his condolences over the tragedy, I told him that Gabby and I had found Palin’s website very disturbing.
“Sarah Palin actually has a map with gun crosshairs over people’s districts!” I said.
I had woken up that morning never imagining that by sunset I’d be talking on the phone with the president about my critically wounded wife. But now, as Gabby struggled to stay alive and I had my cell phone pressed hard against my ear, I needed to vent and President Obama let me. I was stressed out and pissed off.
Gabby Page 17