Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [22]
Gloria says she is sometimes uncomfortable being so present in Gabby’s life, and in mine. As an adult, Gabby had been a self-sufficient world traveler, someone who loved her parents and saw them whenever she could, but never needed a great deal from them. “She was always so busy,” Gloria says. “She had a full life. I didn’t know the names of all her friends or her staffers. Days could go by and I wouldn’t know what she was up to or which city she was in. Gabby was living her life and I was living mine.”
But now, at age seventy-three, Gloria has returned to motherhood in the most intimate ways. She spends much of every day and night at Gabby’s side. She monitors the food Gabby eats, the drugs she takes, her bathroom visits, her shower schedule, her mail, her pain, and the stitches on her skull. Everything.
I watch in admiration and appreciation. During the first four months of Gabby’s recovery I was training intensely for my space shuttle mission, and then I was in space for sixteen days. “Whenever you can’t be at the hospital, I will be your eyes and ears here,” Gloria promised me early on. “I’ll watch for the subtle things. I’ll tell you everything.”
She kept her word. Those e-mails I get from Gloria start at daybreak and continue lighting up my BlackBerry until well after midnight. And even when the rest of us have doubts, she remains a raging optimist. A month after the shooting, Gloria wrote an upbeat e-mail to friends. She said Gabby had gone from “a kind of limp noodle” to someone who was “alert, sits up straight with good posture, and works very hard. Little Miss Overachiever is healing very fast.” Someone leaked that e-mail to the media, and a reporter called Gloria, asking her how she’d sum up Gabby’s progress. “Yippee!” Gloria said. “And you can quote me on that!”
I see how Gabby has gotten her strength from both her parents. Gloria and Spencer gave her the foundation, the life experiences, and an offbeat view of the world that helped shape her.
On the Mother’s Day before she was injured, Gabby wrote a message on her campaign blog: “Today I am thinking about my mom, Gloria. I am very much her daughter, and I am grateful for all her love and support. My mom truly is my greatest inspiration. Both my mom and dad instill in me their values of hard work, treating others with dignity and respect, and giving back, which have made me the person I am today.”
Gloria, nicknamed Jinx, is well known in Arizona art circles as a painter, mostly in oils, and as an art conservator and historian with a great interest in the religious art and architecture of Mexico. She teaches, she collects, she writes art books, and she takes a stand on issues. She believes, for instance, that artists and artisans have a responsibility to consider the effects of aging and the environment when they create their works. She has studied the varnishes artists use, and how sculptures should be crafted to stand the tests of time. As she sees it: “Competent artists are obligated to produce products of structural integrity.”
That statement speaks to how Gloria looks at life and how she raised Gabby and her older sister, Melissa. We all have obligations to our jobs, our families, our communities, and those obligations extend far beyond this moment. In her commitment to public service, Gabby recognized that she had to make good decisions not just for today, or for this election cycle, but for future generations. Gloria taught Gabby that, like a well-made piece of art, her efforts needed to stand the test of time.
Born in Nebraska and raised as a Christian Scientist, Gloria spent parts of her childhood in Arizona and Kansas. When she was twenty years old, in 1958, she got engaged to the son of a farmer her mother knew in Nebraska. “I was raised to go to college to find a husband—the MRS degree,” Gloria says. “This young man was handsome, I was cute, we dated, and then we planned our wedding.”
On the day of the ceremony,