Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [130]
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