Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [144]
“Yes,” Gabby said. “Yes.”
We didn’t talk about the Tucson gunman too much, though Gabby did look at a photo of him online. She stared at his smirking face, but had no comment. She was aware of the questions about his mental stability, his fitness to stand trial. Given her advocacy throughout her career for mental-health care, she understood that these were issues that needed to be sorted through. Still, she didn’t see a need to contain her own personal feelings about this man, which were understandably visceral.
“What would you like to see happen to him?” I asked her.
“Rot,” she said.
I found it interesting that this woman, with a limited ability to communicate, could sum things up in just one syllable.
As Gabby’s life settled into a predictable pattern of weekday therapy and more-relaxed weekends at home, she was better able to get back to one of her favorite roles, that of the concerned wife.
One day she said to me, “Brief. Brief.”
I thought she was talking about a briefcase or a pair of underwear. Maybe I was telling her stories that were too long.
“Brief,” she said again.
Then it hit me. She wanted me to work on my “debrief” for a meeting I was scheduled to have at NASA, debriefing my managers on the particulars of STS-134.
I did as Gabby said, prepared well for the meeting, and afterward, I couldn’t wait to get home to tell her about it. She was a good listener.
I told her how there were ten of us, seven men and three women, gathered in the conference room—my crew, the people from flight-crew operations, several of our managers. We talked about the mission in detail, the successes and the challenges. I thanked my managers for their support when Gabby was injured. But I also wanted to bring up the matter of a recent e-mail I’d received from another manager about astronaut evaluations of my crew.
The e-mail asked me to say something negative about each member of my crew. “They were calling it constructive feedback,” I told Gabby, “but to me, it’s like they want to make sure they have some negative evidence they can point to if they want to deny someone a flight assignment or a specific position or role. I didn’t like it, and I told them I refused to do it. I said, ‘I don’t think you manage people well through negativism. They’re in space, they’re risking their lives, and it’s a tough job. I’d rather focus on what’s positive.’”
“Yes,” Gabby said, nodding her head. That sounded right to her.
I continued to vent. I told Gabby that during sixteen days in space, we hadn’t received one single positive or supportive e-mail from our office. This was my fourth space shuttle flight, and I’d never before seen stinginess with praise. We had completed all of our objectives. We didn’t hurt anyone or break anything. The flight directors and the space shuttle and station program offices were extremely happy with our performance. But from our management? Nothing. How hard was it to type “good job” and press “send”?
“I pointed all of this out at the meeting,” I said to Gabby. Then I told her what happened next. One of our managers stood up and said, “I’ve been here thirty years, and in thirty years I’ve never seen anything like this! There are four thousand people being laid off around here, and you guys are worried about constructive criticism and no positive feedback? You guys are a bunch of pussies!”
Gabby’s eyes widened as I spoke. “Oh no, oh no!” she said.
“He was pretty upset, but I was really surprised that he chose that word,” I told her. “We’d had this very challenging mission that was one hundred percent successful. We just risked our lives serving our country, and he was calling us ‘pussies’ in front of three women, one of whom was his boss.” I’d been dealing with Gabby having a difficult time finding the right word. Apparently this boss of mine had the same problem.
“Terrible,” Gabby said.
“So I figured I’d better smooth things over. I said to them, ‘Well, I didn’t expect things to go this way. I was just trying