- Brittany Walz
Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords called her husband, NASA astronaut Mark Kelly, at his home outside of Houston as she was getting ready to start her Congress on Your Corner event on Saturday, Jan. 8.
“I was a little bit surprised,” Kelly says. “She’d just been sworn in, and it didn’t take her long before she was going to be out there, letting everybody say what they think.”
About a half hour later, he got a phone call from Pia Carusone, Giffords’ chief of staff. Gabby had been shot. Carusone had no other details.
Kelly was in disbelief. He had to check his phone to see if he’d really just received the call.
Once the initial shock wore off, Kelly sprang into action. In less than two hours, he in a friend’s private plane and on his way to Tucson.
Soon enough, he’d learn the other grim details. Six people killed. Thirteen others wounded. And his wife was fighting for her life after being shot once in the head at close range.
Kelly has spent every day since at University Medical Center. For the first five days, he slept there. In recent days, he’s been getting to the hospital around 6:30 a.m. and leaving sometime around 9 or 10 at night.
In the early morning hours or late at night, he finds some solace by visiting the shrine in front of University Medical Center and feeling the outpouring of love from the Tucson community.
Gabby is communicating to him in simple ways: Taking his ring from his finger and putting it on her own, or touching his face, or rubbing his neck.
“She knows it’s me,” he says. “There are things she does when only I’m sitting there that she used to do all the time.”
It’s been called a storybook romance: The congresswoman and the astronaut. The two met while both were part of a tour group in China. Their first date came almost a year later, when Kelly, now 46, joined her for a tour of the Arizona prison system’s death-row facility in Florence, because Giffords, who was then a state lawmaker, needed to visit the prison to better understand pending legislation.
“She couldn’t find anybody to go with her,” Kelly remembers. “I’m like, ‘Wow. I wouldn’t mind doing that. I’ll go with you.’”
The two were married in November 2007, at the Agua Linda farm in Amado.
Since the wedding, the couple has much of their time apart. Giffords, 40, splits her time between Tucson and Washington, while Kelly lives in Houston, near the Johnson Space Center, where he has been training for the final space shuttle mission, which is schedule to launch in April.
He says he doesn’t know if he’ll still command the Endeavour mission in the wake of Giffords’ shooting, although he hopes he’ll be able to.
“I’ve been training for this flight for a year and a half,” he says. “I know it better than anybody else.”
Nonetheless, he says the day after the shooting, he “called my boss and said we have to come up with a plan, because I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do this.”
Kelly says that in the last couple of years, Gabby had worried that all of the heated talk on the campaign trail could lead to violence.
“She would say, ‘I’m a little bit concerned that at some point, someone will shoot me,’” Kelly says. “We talked about it at least a dozen times. We talked about it two weeks ago.”
But Gabby wouldn’t consider the idea of limiting public events.
“She really feels it’s important to let people say to her, face to face, what their concerns are, what they think about the job she’s doing,” Kelly says. “I go to a lot of those events. People would yell at her, and we’d get in the car, and I’d complain about it, and she’d say, ‘Hey, people have the right to tell me what they think.’ And that person is her constituent as much as the person who volunteers on her campaign. That’s part of democracy. She knew it was part of her job.”
Kelly views the recent calls for more civility in politics as “a good idea. People should be able to disagree without getting nasty about it. And in her last campaign, there was a lot of heated discussion that certainly, in my opinion, may have crossed the line.”
And there’s one thing he wants you to know: We haven’t seen the last of Gabrielle Giffords.
“Let me tell you this: She will make a full recovery,” Kelly says. “I know her really well, and she is going to come back stronger and more committed than ever. I can almost guarantee you what her first event will be, and I hate saying this, but I’d be shocked if the first thing she does is not Congress on Your Corner at that same Safeway. That’s the kind of person she is.”
This article appears in Jan 13-19, 2011.
That Safeway parking lot isn’t big enough to hold all the people that will show up to see her when she comes back.
The morning of Saturday, January 8th started as most Saturday mornings for me in Tucson. I left my house a little before nine to go teach children’s creative movement classes at a studio one light from the Safeway where Gaby Gilfords was going to speak. I had received a group voice mail from Ms. Gilfords telling of her town hall meeting, and had intended to tell my father (an American Studies professor, visiting from New Jersey) to bring my children to this event.
In my rush that morning, I neglected to tell my Dad about this event. Lucky for my wife she was late waking up because she headed to Safeway when they were closing off the area (right after the terrible carnage had transpired) and she couldn’t get into the parking lot. It could so easily have been my father and my children, or my wife that were caught in the horrible shooting. We live one block from that Safeway and shop there for groceries every week.
I have written this song in an attempt to somehow come to grips with the reality of what took place. My main focus in this song is Christina Taylor Green (the youngest victim). My older daughter went to the same school as Christina and my middle daughter was conceived three days before Christina was born. In July of 2001, two months before 9/11, we visited New York and were on the very Towers that saw their end that September.
On July 11th, 2006, while my wife was in labor with my youngest daughter, a news program played from a nearby television. There had been a horrible train bomb in Bombay. Recently, while trying to comprehend how a madman could come to our grocery store, with over 100 bullets intending to kill our Congress woman and as many other people as he could, I feel a greater empathy for folks in Moscow caught in another act of terrorism.
Terrorism and suffering are part of our world, no matter where you live. When tragedies like these happen, we are forever changed. We are but one world, one planet. Let us heal together and find a way to stop the insane violence that shows it’s face too often.
If you have a moment, please visit the attached You Tube clip (that I created) of a song that I have written as a means of somehow digesting this horrible event which took place a block from my home.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ootdk05yFy0
Thank you in advance for listening.
Jeffrey Marc Rockland