From such small exchanges, our ability to understand each other blossomed.
When we had first settled into my home in League City, I was a little concerned that the press might stake out the house, trying to get videos and photos of Gabby. But the media turned out to be generally very respectful of Gabby’s privacy, as they’d been since January 8. (With the exception of the two news helicopters and the ten cameramen and reporters who showed up the first day Gabby was home, we didn’t see much of the media in the neighborhood.)
We knew, of course, that people wanted an update on how Gabby was doing and what she looked like now. For that reason, a few days before Gabby left TIRR, her office released two photos of her. Taken by Gabby’s friend P. K. Weis, one of the photos was a simple portrait of Gabby wearing glasses, her hair darker and shorter than people remembered. The other photo showed Gabby and Gloria together, both of them smiling. Except for that grainy footage taken of Gabby boarding the stairs onto that NASA jet in April, this was the first time since the shooting that the world got to see Gabby. We heard from countless friends and strangers telling Gabby she looked great. She was buoyed by their good wishes.
Though Gabby kept improving, it was sometimes dispiriting for her to go to outpatient group therapy, where many of those with brain injuries weren’t as far along as she was. In her “group communication” sessions, there were eight men and Gabby, no other women. Only one of the men could speak at all. Gabby came home at night and would tell me about it. “Scary,” she said.
I hadn’t been in favor of Gabby joining group therapy until Jimmy Hatch, a friend of Gabby’s, visited us. Jimmy is a Navy SEAL, and in 2010 Gabby had helped him through bouts of depression related to injuries he’d received in Afghanistan. He’d been in group therapy for service-related head trauma. “Gabby ought to try it,” he told me when he came to Houston. “She may find comfort seeing other folks with similar problems. It could motivate her to improve.” Gabby had helped Jimmy. Now he had come to help her.
Gabby did well in group therapy, but it was hard to watch others who struggled there.
Kristy drove with Gabby to rehab, and she’d sometimes peek through the window of the therapy room to see what was going on. Most of the patients were silent, slumped over, not too alert. “Gabby sits there, singing away,” Kristy told me.
It was sad to hear about these other patients, and it only made us more grateful for Gabby’s progress.
Gabby began venturing out into public more. One day, for occupational therapy, she went shopping at a drugstore for an hour, reading labels and filling her cart. She bought various toiletries, including toothpaste for me. I had asked her to get Aquafresh, which I normally use. But she bought me Tom’s natural toothpaste, because it had fewer chemicals. She always had that stuff in Tucson, and even though I told her it tasted horrible, that’s what she got me.
It was a surreal scene at the drugstore, with two Capitol Police officers wearing their suits and strolling the store with empty carts. Everyone in the store had to know they weren’t shoppers; it was obvious they were there for Gabby’s protection.
Gabby’s first public appearance before a large group came on June 27 at a NASA awards ceremony. I wasn’t sure she should attend; her previous outings had been subject to detailed advanced planning. This outing would be impromptu. But Gabby insisted she wanted to be there. I had announced my retirement from NASA and the Navy a few days earlier, and Gabby knew this was her last chance to see me get a NASA award.
My Endeavour crew and I were set to receive the NASA Space Flight Medal for our work on STS-134, and six hundred people had gathered in the IMAX Theater at the Johnson Space Center’s visitor center for the ceremony. Many in the audience worked for the space program or were the friends or family of astronauts, but a lot of people from the general public were there, too.
When Gabby entered the auditorium in her wheelchair unannounced, we could hear the crowd murmuring as people realized she was there. Within a minute, the entire audience had risen for a prolonged standing ovation for Gabby. She smiled and waved. Hundreds of cameras seemed to be flashing at once, and Gabby was genuinely grateful for the crowd’s affectionate welcome.
When I received my medal, Gabby stood up, and I walked over to hug and kiss her. The crowd liked that. After the ceremony, my crew and I narrated a PowerPoint presentation of photos taken during our flight. Then a fourteen-minute video of mission highlights was shown on the giant IMAX screen, with “Beautiful Day” as part of the soundtrack.
Gabby and I made eye contact as the song played. We were both smiling, but I figured she was thinking the same thing I was—about all that had transpired in the five years since she first played that song for me as a wake-up call in space.
We had both learned so much. What defines a beautiful day? Sometimes, something as simple as a sentence with a question mark at the end of it.
If people can’t ask questions, it’s not always easy to have a conversation with them. You don’t realize that until you spend your life with someone unable to ask a question.
Gabby’s inquisitiveness used to define her. She was full of great questions. I loved that about her, and I missed it. As the months went by, I knew she must have had a lot of questions piling up in her head. I continued trying to coax them out of her, with no success. I would frequently just answer those unasked questions for her. That resulted in a lot of one-sided conversations. In time, things improved.
People would always ask Gabby, “How are you?” Eventually, she was able to easily answer, “I’m fine, how are you?” But that was sort of a rote response. She was repeating what she’d just heard. It was very practiced.
Meanwhile, I kept waiting and hoping for a real question.
On July 6, two days before the six-month anniversary of the shooting, the breakthrough came. Gabby and I were alone together at home, eating dinner. “What did you do today?” I asked her.
“Therapy,” she answered.
“How did it go?”
“Worn out,” she said. “Really tired. This is hard. I’m trying.”
We continued eating our salad and spaghetti. Then Gabby turned to me. “Your day?” she said.
From her inflection, I completely felt the question mark at the end of the sentence.
“Gabby, was that a question? Are you asking me how my day was?”
She was sensing the power of the moment, too. “Yes!” she said.
Her entire face lit up with a big smile. She spoke more confidently: “Yes, how was your day?”
I was momentarily shocked. “Gabby, this is a big deal!” I said. “I’ve been trying to get you to ask me a question for months, and now you’ve done it. This is the first time you’ve asked me anything!”
Gabby smiled. I was actually emotional. It’s not that I was going to cry. I was just very happy. Almost overwhelmed.
“Your day?” Gabby said again. In my excitement, I couldn’t even remember my day at all. I took out my BlackBerry and scrolled through e-mails to jog my memory.
“Let’s see, I went to lunch with Claudia.” I continued scrolling down. “I went into my office at NASA to pack up some things and go through everything on my computer . . .”
Gabby listened intently. “Oh,” I said, “I also went to Dillard’s to return your clothing.”
She smiled. She definitely considered that to be a necessary errand. I had gone shopping days earlier and bought Gabby a pair of shorts that were too big and a pair of white jeans. She hated the jeans. She actually had a negative physical reaction to them. She shuddered. I’d never gone clothes shopping for her before and I apparently wasn’t very good at it. How was I to know that Gabby wouldn’t like white jeans?
In any case, after I finished answering Gabby’s question, I told her how happy I was to hear it. “You’ve finally asked a question, a real one. And it’s something you wanted to know. It’s really great.”
Gabby and I were both grinning.
“Now,” I said, �
�you just have to come up with another one.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Inch by Inch
Once Gabby had moved home with me, I began taping Meet the Press every Sunday on my digital video recorder. Gabby liked the show. It kept her abreast of issues in Washington. We developed a little ritual of watching it together later in the day.
One Sunday afternoon in July, as Gabby headed for the bathroom, I told her I’d meet her in the living room so we could watch the show. I sat down on the couch, but she never showed up. After ten minutes, I went looking for her.
I found her in the bedroom. “Sit down,” she said. “Shut the door.”
It occurred to me that she should have told me to shut the door and then sit down, but I didn’t correct her. I saw by the expression on her face that she was serious. I closed the door. I sat down.
“Shot,” she said.
“Yes, you were shot in the head,” I said. She knew that, of course, but sometimes it helped a conversation if I provided a sentence to get started.
“Questions and answers,” she said, very seriously.
I could sense what was coming. It had been more than six months since her injury, but now she was ready to find out.
“Who died?” she asked.
This was only the fourth or fifth question she’d asked me since the “Your day?” breakthrough a few weeks earlier.
I’d spent months considering exactly how I’d deliver the news when asked this question. But now that the moment was here, I needed to take a step back. Our friends Marc and Suzanne Winkelman, and their daughter, Eli, were driving in from Austin for a visit. They’d be arriving in forty minutes. I didn’t want to give Gabby all the terrible details, knowing she’d then have to be upbeat and social for visitors. I explained that to Gabby.
“I’m glad you’ve asked me this,” I told her. “You know, after you were injured, there was a lot of debate about how much to tell you about the shooting. Doctors said it was best to wait to tell you all the names until you were able to ask questions yourself. That made sense to me. And now that you’ve asked, I’m going to tell you. But I know it’s going to upset you. So let’s wait until tonight, after the Winkelmans leave. I promise I’ll talk to you about who died and show you their photos.”
Gabby understood that the news would likely leave her distraught. She’d waited this long. Could she wait a few more hours? “Yes,” she said.
We had a great time with the Winkelmans. Gabby was very engaged and interacted with them easily. When they left, and Gabby had gotten into bed, I came and sat beside her.
“OK,” I said. “I’m going to tell you who died on January eighth. It’s going to be really hard because you knew two of the people.”
Gabby waited for me to continue.
“One of the people killed was on your staff,” I said. “It was Gabe. Gabe Zimmerman.”
She started half-crying, half-moaning. She was overwhelmed with grief. I gave her a hug and then I continued. I wanted to get it all out.
“And do you remember John Roll, the federal judge?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Well, he was standing very close to you when the shooting started. He was near Ron Barber. You know that Ron survived, but Judge Roll, he didn’t make it. He died.”
I then told Gabby about the four people killed whom she didn’t know. I spoke about Phyllis Schneck, the seventy-nine-year-old widow from New Jersey who was devoted to her church, loved to read, and had come to the Congress on Your Corner event to talk about border security. I let Gabby know about Dorothy Morris, the seventy-six-year-old retired secretary whose husband, a retired airline pilot, had tried to save her by covering her with his own body. Shot in the shoulder, he survived.
I told Gabby about Dorwan Stoddard, the retired road-grader who died while protecting his wife and childhood sweetheart. His wife was shot in the legs but lived. Finally, I spoke about Christina-Taylor Green, the nine-year-old girl with a passionate interest in government.
About three months earlier, a nurse at TIRR had inadvertently told Gabby that a young girl had died in the shooting. So Gabby was aware of Christina’s death. But she’d never seen photos of Christina or the other victims until I showed them to her that night on my computer.
I held on to Gabby as she digested the news and cried. She didn’t ask questions; she had a hard time saying anything. So I just continued talking to her.
I told her about the funerals I had attended, and she listened. “At Gabe’s funeral, his brother spoke, along with his dad and C.J. from your office. I said a few words on your behalf.”
I tried to give Gabby a sense of what I had said at the funeral—about how Gabe was a great young man who wanted to help people. I told her about the bipartisan resolution to name a meeting room at the U.S. Capitol’s Visitor Center in Gabe’s memory. Gabby knew Ross Zimmerman, Gabe’s father, because he sometimes came in to the office. “Would you like to call Ross one of these days?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she said, and we made plans to do that.
Before she went to sleep, I asked Gabby how she was feeling.
“I’m sad,” she said. “Sad, sad, sad.”
I was sad, too. The rest of us already had six months to grieve for those who died. For Gabby, the grief would be fresh and raw. Still, it was a relief that she finally asked the question we’d all been waiting for. She needed to know who was lost on January 8. Now she did.
It was remarkable, really, that despite everything, Gabby kept soldiering on, giving her all in therapy.
To me, it seemed she was making excellent progress, day by day, but I wanted to better understand the extent of her cognitive abilities, and how all of us could help her continue to improve. I heard good things from several people in the brain-injury field about Dr. Nancy Estabrooks, an expert in neurological communication disorders at Western Carolina University. I invited her to spend the day with us, getting to know Gabby and testing her.
At age seventy, Nancy had studied brain trauma and recovery for decades. Her insights were very helpful. She explained that most people with aphasia—an impairment of language ability—are the victims of strokes or they have head injuries from falls or car accidents or, among soldiers, from IEDs. As I knew, those with brain injuries from bullets rarely live, and if they do, their prognosis is often very bad. Gabby was very much an outlier.
Nancy explained that during World Wars I and II, a large number of soldiers survived being shot in the head, and so there was useful research on the treatment of “traumatic aphasia” based on their cases. Many of these soldiers made a relatively good recovery from aphasia. Some recovered fully. In more recent wars, however, the caliber and velocity of bullets increased. Advances in battlefield medicine have kept more soldiers alive with devastating injuries, but for the few who survive being shot in the head, the gravity of their brain damage tends to be more pronounced. They often have a tougher time recovering than those injured in past wars, which is yet another burden for the health-care system, and their families.
In Nancy’s many decades working with aphasia patients, she’d seen more than one thousand cases of stroke-related aphasia, but only a handful of cases involving shooting victims. As a result, she said, in order to treat the rare survivors like Gabby, aphasiologists still turn to research done in the 1940s, with World War II vets who were shot in the head.
Nancy explained that Gabby appeared to have a form of “nonfluent aphasia,” which meant she had good auditory verbal comprehension but had trouble saying complete sentences. Nancy got up to speed on Gabby’s progress: the “zombie” she was early on, the repetition of the word “chicken,” the great strides she had made since then, both physically and verbally.
Nancy sat with Gabby at the kitchen table from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., with just a break for lunch and a short afternoon nap for Gabby. Gloria was there for most of the testing, and I was also around for a lot of it.
Gabby was eager to perform well, and hopefu
l that Nancy would find ways to help her. Gloria thought Gabby was very much Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords that day—alert, serious, with good posture, her eyes focused on Nancy’s face during her opening remarks about her qualifications and her plans for the day.
Nancy noticed quickly that Gabby never wavered in her attention or ability to stay on task, that she could understand subtle directions, and that she was able to concentrate despite distractions in the house, including me walking around doing chores. “These facts alone are a very positive sign for Gabby’s recovery,” Nancy said.
Gabby did well on almost all of Nancy’s tests. Nancy laid out photos of various U.S. presidents in random order. Without being asked, Gabby began arranging them, left to right, chronologically. She eliminated the “ringer,” Ben Franklin, knowing he didn’t belong. She held up the photo of Franklin and said, “Wonderful. Electricity.”
Nancy scribbled in her notes: “For FDR, she spontaneously commented, ‘Roosevelt,’ ‘wheelchair,’ ‘braces.’ For Jimmy Carter, she said, ‘Habitat for Humanity.’”
Gabby earned a perfect score while arranging and identifying photos of other famous people, including First Ladies and politicians from other countries. She had no trouble identifying the face that didn’t belong in a particular group, and made appropriate comments without being asked. She called Margaret Thatcher “Iron Lady.”
Nancy was also impressed to see that Gabby was up on the news. Gabby looked at Arnold Schwarzenegger’s photo and said, “Messin’ around. Babies.’” When she looked at a photo of Michele Bachmann, she said “Tea Party” and “Running for president.”
Nancy gave Gabby a set of cards with photos that told a story, and asked her to put them in order. In Gabby’s early months at TIRR, this sort of exercise was beyond her, but now she aced it every time.
One set of illustrations was set at a gambling casino. Gabby easily put the cards in the correct order: (1) A man sits at a slot machine. (2) He looks frustrated; he’s obviously losing. (3) He abandons the machine. (4) Just then a woman appears and sits down at the machine. (5) The man watches her pull the lever. (6) The woman wins a jackpot.
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