Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [60]
But then, suddenly, as she held my hand, she recognized something familiar. I could feel her fingertips exploring my ring, and then, despite seeming as if she was unconscious, she actually pulled the ring off and began to move it around in her fingers, just like always. She easily moved it from one of her fingers to the next for the next five minutes. She didn’t drop it once.
Her eyes remained closed, tubes were everywhere, but she was somehow able to direct the fingers of her one good hand to rediscover her old pastime. I was more than surprised. I was overwhelmed. For the first time since she was shot, I felt as if I had a clear reason for hope. “She’s still Gabby,” I thought. “She’s going to pull out of this.”
After she returned the ring to me, I had to tell her doctors. I called them into her room and tried to move the ring from one of my fingers to the next, one-handed, just as Gabby had done. I didn’t have the dexterity to do it. I ended up dropping the ring.
By then, Gabby had returned to the stillness of her comatose state. But the doctors told me that her performance with the ring was a hugely encouraging sign.
Every day after that, I’d hold Gabby’s hand, and she continued to take off my ring and play with it. At that point, she was unable to speak, and she didn’t seem as if she understood much of what anyone said to her. And yet she’d move that ring up and down my finger, and then onto her fingers, and then she’d place it back where it belonged, on my hand. It was a lifeline for her. And for me, too.
Gabby and I were married on November 10, 2007, and my ring actually went missing just before we said our vows. The evening ceremony was outdoors at an organic-produce farm thirty-five miles south of Tucson, and our ringbearer was the four-year-old son of one of my fellow astronauts.
The kid was named Laurier in memory of our friend Laurel Clark, an astronaut who was killed in 2003, when space shuttle Columbia disintegrated on reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. I understood the sentiment behind this, but I also thought Laurier was too close to “A Boy Named Sue” for a kid growing up in Texas. We all know how that story ended; I pictured this poor kid showing up at school and getting his ass kicked. I did him a favor and gave him the nickname “Buster” before he was born.
Anyway, as our wedding approached, I had some concerns about our choice of ringbearer. Buster was a good kid, but I thought he may have been too young and not capable of making it down the aisle without incident. “What if he drops the ring?” I asked his mother.
“He won’t drop the ring,” she assured me.
Sure enough, he dropped the ring in the grass right before he needed to hand it over to us. Three hundred guests were left rustling and giggling while my brother and Buster’s mom looked for it. It seemed like five minutes before they found it.
It didn’t matter. Our wedding was such an eclectic mix of people, customs, cultures, and unconventional touches that a renegade ring-bearer just added to the festivities.
Gabby, of course, was the mastermind of the whole event. Though long retired from the role of “Annie,” she still liked to put on a show. She didn’t need or want a lavish wedding. But she loved the idea of making the wedding a statement about our roots, our personalities, and the causes that mattered to us.
She arranged for a “low-carbon-footprint” wedding and tried to make everything recyclable or reusable. The utensils and plates were made of biodegradable sugarcane and cornstarch. Flower arrangements were homemade, and wedding favors were simple jars of honey from the Santa Cruz River valley. “I’m trying to tread lightly on this Earth,” Gabby explained to people when they asked how the planning was going. “I’m looking for ways to minimize the