Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [37]
Before her injury, Gabby was diligent about trying to avoid all processed food. Raoul had turned her on to eating natural products, and with his encouragement, she was always reading the labels on food packaging. That continued even after she was injured, though I’m not sure she could make sense of the ingredients she was reading about, or that she was able to decipher the fine print with her damaged eyes. She’d frequently have to cover or close one eye to read those labels, or she’d alternate from one eye to the other.
Raoul saw that Gabby didn’t like a lot of the hospital food—she’d make that clear by pushing it away—so he’d smuggle in things he knew she’d eat, such as Greek yogurt, fresh fruit, vegetables, and salads.
Raoul had an intuitive sense about Gabby, and he recognized that when she was feeling depressed, she often didn’t have much of an appetite. “Eating is part of the healing process,” Raoul told her. “You’ve got to eat. You’ll heal faster and get out of here faster. And you’ve got to stay positive. That’s really important.”
In her own chosen words, Gabby kept telling Raoul—and the rest of us, too—that she wanted to leave the hospital. “Fly away home,” she’d say. “Fly away!”
The imagery of that, as if Gabby could rise from her wheelchair and fly off like a bird, was so poignant to us. When Raoul was on duty, his answer was often the same: “Well, let’s be positive and you’ll fly out of here faster.”
They’d continue sitting together, Gabby picking at her food, and a few minutes later, she’d reflect on his advice. “Positive,” she’d say, almost to him but more to herself. It was as if she were trying to shrug off her sadness and her urge to cry. A few more bites of food. “Positive. Positive.”
Even when Gabby wasn’t greeting visitors at the hospital, it was as if she had unexpected company. Letters and e-mails came in every day from well-wishers: strangers, constituents, die-hard Democrats, die-hard Republicans, people who’d recovered from brain injuries, and well-meaning people offering therapeutic advice. A boy in Arizona sold his toys for $2.85 and sent it along so Gabby would have lunch money. A woman from Florida sent Gabby her very own “Astronaut Barbie,” which included the tag line “First stilettos on the moon!” The woman wrote: “The adage is ‘the sky is the limit,’ but certainly not in your case.”
Gabby also heard from almost everyone she’d ever known earlier in her life. Her mom, Gloria, would sit with her reading these letters from friends and acquaintances, stopping to interject her own comments or flashes of memory. Gabby seemed to enjoy the reminiscing, even though she couldn’t articulate her own recollections.
A lot of the letter-writers described their impressions of her back when she was younger. It was as if they felt a need to remind her about the kind of person she was, and the traits they admired in her before she was injured. She heard from a long-lost cousin, now teaching in China, and from her long-ago Brownie troop leader. A friend from college recalled Gabby’s “tenacity, wit and strength as a listener,” and how people viewed her as a one-of-a-kind woman on campus, “always rehabilitating old Vespa scooters and motorcycles.” Gabby was pretty handy as a mechanic.
Bob Gardner, a former El Campo Tire employee now living in Virginia, described his initial thought when he heard that Gabby, the boss’s twenty-six-year-old daughter, would be taking over the business: “To me, that meant a spoiled, snot-nosed kid would be going through the motions of running the company, asking questions, getting in the way of everyone