Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [82]
There was one highly charged Congress on Your Corner event in 2009 where people were arguing about the health-care bill. A man’s gun dropped out of its holster and slid across the floor of the Safeway supermarket. That was a scary moment for Gabby and her staffers; they realized people could be coming to COYC events armed.
On that particular day, there had been a group of people of Mexican descent waiting two hours to talk to Gabby. When they got to the front of the line, they hugged her and she spoke to them in Spanish. They related to her very warmly.
An angry Tea Party supporter watched Gabby interact with this group of people and shouted at her, “That’s why you’re going to lose in November—because the Mexicans love you!”
Gabby knew well that fringe elements were damaging Arizona’s reputation. She accepted that she’d have to live with sizable pockets of zealots. Some were vociferously anti-immigration, seeing no areas for compromise. Others were so pro-gun that they thought any laws requiring background checks or waiting periods were a threat to society. There were those who so hated Obama’s health-care bill that the veins in their necks bulged when they yelled at Gabby about it.
Gabby knew she represented these people, too. She often spoke about that to me. “I represent everyone who voted against me in the last election as equally as I represent my closest supporters,” she’d say. She hoped people’s anger could be tempered, that there was room for understanding. Publicly, she spoke of hope. Privately, she was sometimes less optimistic.
On Friday, January 7, 2011, the night before Gabby was shot at her Congress on Your Corner event, she received an e-mail from Kevin Bleyer, a writer we know who works for Jon Stewart’s Daily Show. The Comedy Central program had made fun of Arizona thirteen times in 2010 for its reactionary politics, its die-hard extremists, and the silly antics of some lawmakers. Kevin sent us a news link about an Arizona state representative we know who had said his goal for the upcoming session of the state legislature was “to try to keep Arizona off The Daily Show.”
From my observations of the state, I thought this was an impossible goal. I also thought it was all kind of funny.
But Gabby saw the note from Kevin in very personal terms. At 7:15 p.m., she replied to Kevin’s e-mail and cc’d me.
“My poor state!” she wrote. “The nut jobs have stolen it away from the good people of Arizona.”
That turned out to be the last e-mail I received from her.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“I Wonder What Happened”
In the days after Gabby first came out of her coma, she became aware, in the haziest of ways, that she was seriously injured. She recognized that she was hospitalized. She knew her loved ones had gathered around her. But she was not in a position to understand what had happened, and we offered no details. She wasn’t ready.
“I was a zombie,” Gabby would say, seven months later, when she tried to describe how she felt after waking up.
For our part, we didn’t know what she was thinking in those first weeks following the shooting. She may have assumed she was in a car accident or that she’d had a stroke. Perhaps she didn’t even consider how she was injured. Her brain wasn’t functioning yet at that level of awareness. And even if it was, a tracheotomy tube prevented her from speaking.
Jerome Caroselli, her neuropsychologist at TIRR, told us that when she was ready to absorb the news, it was important for her recovery that she know what happened to her. She didn’t need to be given the full story anytime soon, or any details about the fates of all the people around her. Almost certainly, that would be too difficult for her to process, especially because she wasn’t able to ask questions. But she deserved to be told how she had been hurt.
“She should know it wasn’t a stroke and it wasn’t a car accident,” Dr. Caroselli said. “You’ll need to tell her she was shot.”
I first attempted to have this discussion with Gabby in early February, less than a month after she was injured. Pretty quickly, I realized that