Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [104]
As Gabby and I watched the TV, I did talk to her about what was going on. “Look how they’re sitting,” I said. “It all feels so different, and it’s because of you.” I sensed that on some level she understood.
Had she been able to truly focus, she would have agreed with the president’s point that bipartisan seating wasn’t enough. “What comes of this moment,” he said, “will be determined not by whether we can sit together tonight, but whether we can work together tomorrow.”
Gabby always knew: Symbols are one thing. Actions are another. If she were to recover her faculties and return to that empty chair, she’d have a great deal to say.
Days after the State of the Union, I was asked to go to Washington to speak briefly at the National Prayer Breakfast. What would Gabby want me to say? I gave great thought to that question as I prepared my remarks. I spoke to her about it, even though she was unable to answer or completely comprehend what I was saying.
Gabby hadn’t fully turned to Judaism until she was a young woman, and she knew I was still trying to make sense of my Catholic roots, and my thoughts about God. Gabby would want me to think hard about what fate meant to me in the wake of the shooting. And so when I took the podium that morning, standing before President Obama and clergymen of every denomination, I wanted to be very honest.
“I was telling Gabby just the other night that maybe this event—this terrible event—maybe it was fate,” I said. “I hadn’t been a big believer in fate until recently. I thought the world just spins and the clock just ticks and things happen for no particular reason.
“But President Lincoln was a big believer in fate. He said, ‘The Almighty has his own purposes.’ He believed there was a larger plan. I can only hope, as I told Gabby, that maybe it’s possible that this is just one small part of that same plan. This event, horrible and tragic, was not merely random. Maybe something good can come from all this. Maybe it’s our responsibility to see that something does.”
I talked about what I’d seen: “From space you have a different perspective of life on our planet. It’s humbling to see the Earth as it was created, in the context of God’s vast universe.”
I also described the growing memorial outside the hospital in Tucson. People had left all sorts of angels and other religious items on the lawn. “It isn’t a formal religious site, but Arizona has turned it into a place of prayer. It’s like stepping into a church, a place with heaven itself as a ceiling. That reminded me you don’t need a church, temple, or mosque to pray. You don’t need a building or walls or an altar. You pray where you are, when God is there in your heart.”
I concluded with a short prayer that Gabby’s rabbi had said at her bedside days earlier. Then I told the three thousand people in attendance, “Please keep Gabby in your prayers and in your hearts. It is really helping. Thank you.”
When I think back to that first month after the shooting, perhaps the most bittersweet moments were on Friday, January 21. That morning, Gabby left Tucson’s University Medical Center to begin rehabilitation at TIRR in Houston.
She had arrived at the hospital in Tucson near death. Now here she was, very much alive, and ready to start the second phase of her recovery.
She left the hospital in an ambulance, accompanied by a large contingent of police and an escort of motorcycle riders from the Veterans of Foreign Wars. This was the same group that Gabby had ridden with in 2009, when they escorted the newly discovered remains of fifty-seven Civil War veterans from Tucson to a cemetery in Sierra Vista, seventy-five miles away.
This time, Gabby was in the ambulance, not on a Harley, but the old vets said she needed an honor guard, and they wanted it to be them.
Hundreds of Gabby’s constituents lined the streets, applauding, cheering, blowing kisses, and waving American flags as the motorcade made its way to Tucson’s Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. Gabby couldn’t see them, but her ambulance driver rolled down his window so she could