Gabby

by Gabrielle Giffords

  The kids cheered wildly, and then, one by one, stepped up to the microphone. Their questions—and questions I later received from students at Tucson’s Gridley Middle School—were familiar to me. When Claudia and Claire were younger, I often spoke to their classes about life as an astronaut. I’d also given talks to other groups of students many times.

  One of the students from Tucson asked how I adjusted to zero gravity.

  “The first time you fly, it takes a while to get used to it,” I answered. “There’s no up and down anymore, and the fluids in your body shift. You don’t feel so well. But this is my fourth flight, and it seems like my body remembers what this is all about. I can adjust more quickly.”

  “How do you sleep in space?” another student asked.

  “You could sleep floating around,” I said, “but you’d bump into other people and wake them up. We sleep in sleeping bags with a bunch of straps and hooks. Sometimes, people sleep on the ceiling. It takes a while to get used to. My first night in space I got in my sleeping bag and rolled over on my side, like I would in bed. That was dumb. There is no side, or up or down. You might as well stay in the position you’re in.”

  The next question: “How do you shower in space?”

  “We don’t have a shower,” I said. “We take a bath like someone would in a hospital bed, with a towel, water, and soap. You rub soap on and wipe it off later. It’s not the greatest, but it works for two weeks.”

  Another student asked what inspired me to be an astronaut. I thought this was a good chance to mention Christina, and how she’d been a dreamer.

  “Over the last four months,” I said, “I’ve come to admire your classmate, Christina Green, very much. I’ve learned a lot about her.

  “When I was Christina’s age, that’s when Apollo astronauts were walking on the moon. I remember watching that on TV and thinking if I worked really hard in school and really, really concentrated, maybe someday I would have the opportunity to fly in space.” I didn’t exactly tell the kids the full story—that I was a late bloomer on the academic front. I figured it was better to just encourage them to start early.

  As the session ended, I had a surprise for the Mesa Verde kids. “Since my wife, Congresswoman Giffords, is from Tucson, I spend a lot of time there,” I said. I showed them the Mesa Verde Mountain Lions 2010–2011 yearbook I had brought with me into space. I held it up in front of the camera. “I’ll get a picture of this with the Earth in the background, and I’ll bring it back and hand it over to your school,” I promised. “I’m opening up to the pages here honoring Christina. It’s a very nice yearbook. Mike and I just signed it, and I’ll get my other crew members to sign it.”

  I twirled the yearbook and it floated like a spinning top in front of me as I waved goodbye to Christina’s friends and classmates.

  Gabby had selected U2’s “Beautiful Day” as my crew’s wake-up song during my 2006 mission, back when we were dating. Bono, the band’s lead singer, once explained that the song is about someone who has suffered great losses in his life, yet finds joy in what he still has. That had meaning for Gabby, long before she was injured.

  Gabby once said to me, “Mark, I really love you, but there is one person on the planet I’d leave you for.”

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “Bono,” she said.

  “Well, I like Bono, too,” I told her. But I’d never give up without a fight.

  Before the launch of STS-134, by coincidence, I received a surprise e-mail from Bono. He had an idea he wanted to discuss with me and asked if we could speak by phone. His idea turned out to be a creative one. He wanted me to send greetings from space to every city on his current tour, while letting some of the lyrics to “Beautiful Day” float in front of me.

  I thought that sounded kind of cool, and told him that if NASA approved, I was game. NASA would likely let me get the video done during some of my free time on the mission.

  Bono then told me that after Gabby was shot and he saw her picture on TV, he had a feeling he had met her before. He had someone look at the photos he had taken once with members of Congress. He located the picture. Gabby has that same photo framed and on her desk.

  I told Bono about Gabby’s crush on him, and that I was sure she’d get a kick out of our plan, too.

  On our first morning in space on this mission, Claudia and Claire selected “Beautiful Day” for our wake-up music because they knew Gabby would appreciate it. Later in the mission, with NASA’s approval, I taped the short video clips for about thirty cities on the U2 tour. “Hello, Chicago, from the International Space Station . . .” “Hello, Montreal . . .” “Hello, Seattle . . .” “Hello, Moncton . . .” How the hell do you pronounce “Moncton”? And where is Moncton, anyway? (The answer is New Brunswick, Canada, but at the time I had no idea.)

  I floated the words in front of me but they kept drifting too far away. It took more than a few takes to get it right.

  It all looked pretty terrific in concert. Each night from the stage, Bono would say, “This next song is dedicated to a woman who serves her country and nearly lost her life in that service.” Then Bono looked up at the giant screen. “Imagine a man looking down on us from two hundred miles up, looking down on our beautiful crowded planet, where borders disappear and cities connect into a beautiful web of lights, where the conflicts of the world are silent. What would he say to us? What words would be in his mind?”

  As he spoke, I was shown floating the words: “Seven Billion. One nation. Imagination. It’s a Beautiful Day.”

  “What’s on your mind, Commander Kelly?” Bono asked.

  “I’m looking forward to coming home,” I said, floating closer to the camera, and then away. “Tell my wife I love her very much. She knows.” (That’s a line from David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.”)

  As the crowd cheered each night and I flickered off the screen, U2 would begin the opening notes of “Beautiful Day.”

  In an e-mail thanking me, Bono explained how the video is received in concert. “It’s quite a special moment,” he wrote, “as it slowly dawns on people what you’re doing with the weightless word puzzle. What’s interesting to me is the level of love and support in the crowd for Gabby. The crowd roars.”

  Gabby was invited to see the moment live in concert, but given her rehab schedule and her difficulty traveling, it never happened. Like thousands of other people, Gabby watched the video—“NASA Commander Mark Kelly appears at U2 360”—on YouTube. Bono is quite charming in it, but she vowed to stay with me.

  On May 30, the day the stitches were removed from Gabby’s head, we undocked from the International Space Station. On June 1, it was time to come home. The landing was set for the early morning hours on the runway at Cape Canaveral, and I knew it would be tough for Gabby to return to see it. I told her I’d get to Houston as fast as I could.

  Our flight directors said the mission had so far gone “absolutely flawlessly,” but I wanted to finish with a flawless landing, too. It was my job to bring Endeavour safely to the runway, and I didn’t want anyone saying I was distracted by the issues swirling in my personal life.

  Shuttle commanders worked very hard to make sure that our landings were as close to perfect as possible. We practice this thousands of times in the shuttle training aircraft—a modified Gulfstream—and in the shuttle simulator. After sixteen days in space, however, it was not an easy thing to do. We’d be dehydrated during reentry because when fluids shift in zero G, astronauts end up passing a significant amount of urine. At the same time, our neurovestibular systems were not quite right. It was not uncommon to be dizzy and tired. Then there was the added pressure of knowing that every detail of the approach and landing are highly scrutinized by NASA’s engineers, the flight control team, and your own colleagues in the astronaut office. It was a lot of pressure, and this landing was at night, which added another level of difficulty.

  At 1:29 a.m., we initiated the de-orbit burn. We entered the Earth’s atmosphere at 2:0
3 a.m., like a glider, with no engines. As the orbiter hits the atmosphere at such a high speed, an incredible amount of friction is generated. This friction strips the atmosphere of some electrons, creating plasma, which is a state of matter that has some properties of a gas but can flow like a liquid. It doesn’t take long for the wings and fuselage to heat up to thousands of degrees, and you are literally flying in the middle of a giant fireball of plasma. There is a bright orange, eerie glow outside. You can’t help but think of the crew of Columbia.

  I’d been in the fireball three other times, but this would be my second landing at the controls. The space shuttle was never known to be a great flying machine in the atmosphere. It is actually a lousy airplane with some pretty objectionable flying qualities. It flies about as well as a Coke machine. Imagine throwing one of those out the back of an airplane. The space shuttle didn’t fly much better.

  I had wanted the shuttle’s wheels to cross the edge of the runway—called the threshold—at an altitude of thirty-two feet. I was at thirty-two feet. At our landing weight, our ideal touch-down speed would be 195 knots. I touched down at 191. You want to touch down at a descent rate of no greater than three feet per second. I touched down at less than one foot per second. I wanted to start braking at 120 knots. I got on the brakes at 119.

  I was really happy with the approach, the landing, and the numbers, which I knew would be closely analyzed.

  I had spent the sixteen-day mission vowing not to screw up, not to let anyone say I shouldn’t have flown. Now, at 2:35 a.m., here we were back on Earth and I was feeling tired, proud—and relieved.

  As the commander, I was the last one out of the ship on the runway. I ducked my head to exit the hatch, then turned around and went back inside for one more look.

  There was an impromptu ceremony on the runway, recognizing the legacy of Endeavour, which would never fly again. It was bittersweet as we stood there. I knew that, like the shuttle behind me, I’d never again return to space.

  The space shuttle program was about to end, and I didn’t think I was suited for a desk job in the astronaut office. I wouldn’t be too enthusiastic about telling other astronauts not to drive so fast at the Kennedy Space Center. Besides, there wouldn’t be too many astronauts in Florida for the foreseeable future. NASA’s next launch vehicle was many years away from being ready to fly.

  I didn’t say it that night, but I pretty much knew I’d soon be retiring from the Navy—and from NASA. That would be my last flight as an astronaut and my last as a naval aviator after twenty-five years of service. Still, it felt like the moment was right. Best of all, I’d be able to have more time with Gabby.

  I e-mailed Gloria to say I’d landed, but it was too late to call Gabby. She was sleeping. I was able to phone her in the morning, and she was so excited to learn I’d returned safely. She told me she loved me three times.

  Because we landed so late after a very long day, we weren’t able to head home until Thursday, June 2. There was a quick press conference when we arrived in Houston, and then I went north to TIRR.

  I walked into Gabby’s room at about 5 p.m., earlier than she expected, and found her still putting on her lipstick. It was just the third time she’d worn makeup since January 8. Though her head was wrapped from surgery, she’d dressed up for me, wearing jeans and a black camisole.

  After we hugged and kissed and hugged again, we sat down together. I was still getting used to gravity, so it was nice to sit in one place, peacefully. “I’ve got your wedding ring,” I said to Gabby. “Would you like it back?”

  I gave it to her, and she took my ring from the chain on her neck and put it on my finger. We remained in her room, contentedly, for a couple of hours, just holding hands, both relieved that we were together.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Great Signs of Progress

  For most of our relationship, Gabby was never overly sentimental about her birthday. A card, a cake, good wishes—that was enough. We were in separate cities sometimes on her birthday, and on mine. We both understood.

  Still, I had to muster up some courage to tell Gabby that I’d be out of town, in London, on Wednesday, June 8, her forty-first birthday. I felt bad that I’d be leaving her, especially since I already had been gone for so long in quarantine and then in space.

  At first, Gabby didn’t register any objection when I said I’d be away. She listened as I explained that I had agreed, before the launch of STS-134, to join British businessman Richard Branson at a gathering of colleagues and entrepreneurs he was hosting at his home. One of Branson’s companies, Virgin Galactic, is working to launch space science missions as well as suborbital space-tourism flights. As I contemplated what my post-NASA life might look like, I thought it was important to meet a creative thinker like Branson. Maybe there was a way to be involved somehow in his space exploration efforts.

  “I might not get another opportunity like this to spend time with him,” I told Gabby, adding that our friend Tilman was going to fly over with me. We’d be gone just four days. Gabby listened and said OK.

  She remembered that I had come through for her on her fortieth birthday, helping her friends throw a surprise party with a mariachi band. This forty-first birthday was a milestone, I knew. She almost didn’t live to see it. But she didn’t seem especially upset by the idea that I’d be away.

  On the Saturday night before Gabby’s birthday, Tilman and Paige hosted a lovely party for her at their house. She had been spending some weekends away from TIRR, staying with me at their guesthouse.

  About fifty people came to the party. We invited family members, doctors, hospital staffers, astronauts, and a few friends from Tucson. Despite all she had been through, Gabby looked beautiful. She wore a gold chain with replicas of various patches from my space shuttle missions as medallions. Her hair was just starting to grow in from the cranioplasty, and the shunt under her scalp and down her neck was barely visible. The lines of incisions from her surgery were pronounced, but Gabby chose not to cover her head with a scarf or wig. Gloria described Gabby’s attitude: “The scars are there. You might as well all take a look.”

  The party was noisy, which at that stage in Gabby’s recovery made for too much stimulation. At one point, a friend who hadn’t seen her since she was injured came over to talk to her. Holding her hand, he soon became emotional. Then Gabby started crying, too. The evening sort of fell apart from there.

  At about 8 p.m., Gabby said she wanted to call it a night and excused herself. “Wiped out,” she said. “Wiped out.” She returned to the guesthouse with her nurse Vivian Lim and got ready for bed while the party continued without her. In Gabby’s honor, Brad Holland, her friend and neighbor from Tucson, sat down at the piano. He played “Tomorrow,” the song from Annie, and Gloria sang along with him. I wasn’t sure if Gabby, in bed over in the guesthouse, could hear it. Everyone wished she were still there. When I came back later to check on her, she was sound asleep.

  Tilman and I headed overseas two days later. We met Richard Branson at his home, which wasn’t a place I’d expect a billionaire to live in. It was kind of ordinary, in a typical British suburb. Richard asked me to give a short, impromptu speech about my space flight and how Gabby was doing to those in attendance, five hundred successful entrepreneurs and other associates, mostly from the United Kingdom. I wasn’t sure what, if anything, would come of the visit, but I enjoyed seeing how engaged Branson was in the future of space exploration. I sat next to him at dinner, and I was inspired listening to his ambitious goals. We spoke of how a revolutionary rocket system could be built to deliver a passenger from New York to Europe in thirty minutes. We’d do that in the space shuttle. His goal was to privatize that capability.

  Given the stresses in my life the past six months—Gabby’s injury, the mission—Tilman suggested that before we returned to the States we could spend one day relaxing on his boat, which was docked in Monaco. “You could use the break,” he said.

  Many people had told me that as a caregive
r, I’d need a respite once in a while. I didn’t think it was such a terrible idea to spend a day on Tilman’s boat.

  But I soon realized that my whole trip wasn’t sitting well with Gabby. She was mad at me for going, and blamed Tilman as a co-conspirator. I called Gabby the night before her birthday and she hardly spoke to me. She handed the phone to Gloria.

  “She’s pissed at you,” Gloria said.

  On June 8, Gabby had her usual six-hour regimen of physical, occupational, and speech therapy. A portion of the physical therapy was done in a pool. After that, hospital staffers, her parents, and some friends shared cake and cupcakes. Her staffers phoned in from their offices in Washington, Tucson, and Sierra Vista and sang “Happy Birthday.” When I called her that day, I could feel her cold shoulder through the phone. She accepted my birthday wishes and then she was done with me.

  I returned to Houston on Thursday night, June 9, and when I came into Gabby’s room, she wouldn’t talk to me or look at me. Finally, she spoke.

  “I am mad at me!” she said.

  She wasn’t the type of woman who’d blame herself when it was really the man in her life who’d screwed up. I knew that. “I think you mean you’re mad at me,” I replied.

  “Yes,” Gabby snapped, and now the words came perfectly. “Yes, Mark, I am mad at you!”

  She didn’t have much else to say to me for the rest of the night. In all our time together, she’d never been that upset with me.

  Part of it was that, since the shooting, her emotions often seemed magnified. When she was happy, she was really happy. When she was sad, she could get very sad. But in this case, I knew I was at fault. I shouldn’t have been gone on her birthday. I shouldn’t have taken that one day in Monaco.

  I came into Gabby’s room the next morning and she rolled her wheelchair around so that her back was to me. I asked Kristy, the nurse, if she’d give us some private time.