Gabrielle Giffords's astronaut husband prepares for space mission
"As you may expect," wrote the congresswoman's mother, "Little Miss Over-Achiever is healing very fast." Gloria Giffords's humour oozed tough affection for a very tough daughter: Gabrielle Giffords, representative for the eighth congressional district of the desert state of Arizona and victim of the assassination attempt in Tucson that claimed the lives of six people, including one of her closest aides, a federal judge and a nine-year-old girl born on 11 September 2001.
Congresswoman Giffords progresses in the care of her doctors, to their quiet astonishment. "There is no one like her," said Dr Imoigele Aisiku, director of neurocritical care at the TIRR Memorial Hermann hospital in Houston, announcing last week's advances.
But in a little over a month, the dramatis personae in the vigil around the survivor's bed will change. For as January came to a close, the congresswoman's husband, Mark Kelly, had a choice to make: either to stay at his wife's bedside every evening – or to leave not only her ward but the planet, and head off into space. His twin brother, Scott, meanwhile – also an astronaut – is due back in a fortnight.
Kelly will be leaving to command the Endeavour space shuttle on mission STS-134, his goal to fit an alpha magnetic spectrometer to the international space station, designed to search for varieties of unusual matter by measuring cosmic rays. The aim is to study no less than the origins of the universe, and find evidence of dark matter and anti-matter. It is the penultimate expedition in the shuttle's history, and Endeavour's last.
Scott Kelly is currently commanding the International Space Station on a five-month stint as a "long duration crewmember" and is due back in March, having left Earth on 9 October last year, while his sister-in-law was busy campaigning against a Tea Party rightwinger to hold her seat in Tucson.
When Mark Kelly undertook his mission, due to leave on 19 April, his wife was supposed to be back in Congress on that date, defending President Obama's healthcare reforms – for which she fought, winning both friends and foes in Arizona – and voting for his proposals to improve American infrastructure in what the president calls, coincidentally, the "Sputnik moment".
But she is not: she is in the TIRR Memorial Hermann's Texas Medical Centre in Houston, having been moved there from Tucson. Although unconscious, Giffords's eyes watered and she smiled as her ambulance drove through streets lined with cheering crowds towards the aeroplane.
A fortnight later, on 4 February, volunteers in Tucson packed away the carpets of tributes left by citizens in their outpouring of pain, hope and grief at the carnage, and love for their congresswoman. The offerings of teddy bears, toy cars, flowers, crosses and tens of thousands of scrawled personal messages – left outside the Safeway supermarket where she was shot, and the University of Arizona Medical Centre to which she and the other wounded had been initially taken – were boxed to be archived by the university, a monument made not of marble or stone but of deep feeling.
A violinist who had played outside the medical centre every day did so for the last time – a mellifluous but lachrymose air. Everyone was wearing a blue-grey wristband reading: Peace, Love, Gabby. The Safeway store manager, Mark Huber, came out to watch the packing away: "People have been just amazing," he said, "the best of our community"; his assistant, beside him, was in tears.
On that same day, Mark Kelly announced that he had made up his mind. All Tucson and much of America watched, transfixed, as he told a news conference at Johnson Space Centre that, with the assent of his family and his wife, he intended to command the 14-day flight. He too was wearing one of those wristbands with a peace sign on it, and the words Peace, Love, Gabby. "I know her very well," he said, "and she would be very comfortable with the decision I have made."
It had not been an easy decision, and – it emerges – it had not been all Kelly's. After the shooting, a back-up commander, Rick Sturckow, had been appointed in the event of Kelly's inability or unwillingness to fly. "Mark obviously had to make the first part of this decision," says Peggy Whitson, chief astronaut at JSC. After that it was up to Nasa to see whether Kelly was fully committed, and emotionally able, to fly the craft and command the mission.
"We thought we had a pretty good process for bringing Mark back into training," said Brent Jett, head of Nasa's flight crew operations directorate. "We talked to all the individuals involved, and were able to unanimously decide that Mark was indeed ready to resume training." Kelly had said he would need to "compartmentalise … something you learn very quickly when you fly an airplane, to separate the mission from things that might be going on in your private life. This time, it might be a little more challenging."
Not only did Kelly say that he would fly, however; he said he expected his wife to be there at the launch. The two first met in 2003: he a highly educated and oft-decorated naval officer from New Jersey and veteran of three space shuttle missions; she a tomboy from Tucson who had grown up on horseback, motorcycles and inline skates, travelled alone through rural Mexico and was now embarking on a political career as the youngest woman ever elected to the state senate.
The occasion of their meeting was an all-party, all-purpose trip to China to ease Sino-American relations. Kelly at that time was married with two daughters and Giffords was in a committed relationship – but none of her boyfriends had impressed one old friend, fellow Arizona Democrat Ken Cheuvront, who told her, "I'm sick of meeting these guys."
A year later, the couple went on what could be called their first date: a sponsored visit to inspect the Arizona state jail in Florence, near Phoenix. "She had it all," Kelly would tell friends: "smart, hard-working, balanced, fun to be with." Moreover, "she laughed at my jokes!"
"I think he was just what she was looking for," recalls Cheuvront, "though she wouldn't admit it. A military man, a he-man." Their first kiss was stolen at Club Congress, a rock music venue in the hotel where John Dillinger stayed before his arrest.
The wedding was held on a ranch near the heart-stoppingly beautiful Santa Rita mountains between Tucson and the Mexican border. The food was Mexican, off the grill, and the dress had been worn by another bride before.
The newlyweds hardly crowded each other out: he lived near Houston with daughters Claudia and Claire, while she commuted between Tucson and Washington. But she attended his Nasa launches, and Kelly played the congresswoman's spouse. He encouraged her in her hallmark: transparent campaigning, meeting-and-greeting and "Congress on Your Corner" events – like the one at which she was shot.
In the aftermath of the shooting, playing with her husband's wedding ring was among the first signals to Kelly that his semi-conscious wife knew who he was. Sometimes, he said, when he was holding her hand she would slip the ring off "and start playing with it. She's put it on her finger, she'll flip it around to the other one. Then she'll put it back on, and that's Gabby, right there. She used to do that all the time".
Kelly keeps a Facebook page, but explains that he is disinclined to post regular bulletins on his wife's progress or second-guess medical opinion. In the days leading up to his launch, his routine is to rehearse over and over again the attachment of equipment, the opening of hatches into the void or responses to possible air leaks, before arriving at the hospital just as his wife completes her daily tasks of simple conversation, eating, walking, work on reflexes and muscle tone, and speech therapy.
There was word that these travails would be punctuated soon by a visit from President George HW Bush (who has met and paid respects to Kelly), though as yet she knows nothing about the carnage that day outside Safeway. According to her press secretary in Tucson, CJ Karamargin, Giffords ordered toast one morning early this month, while eating oatmeal and yoghurt.
Once her husband has gone, the rotation around Giffords's bed will still include her parents, her chief of staff and Stephanie Aaron, the rabbi who married her (Giffords is the only Jewish representative in Arizona's history), and will soon be added to by Scott Kelly, returning from the heavens.
While he is away in space, Mark Kelly says, decisions about his wife's care are to be turned over to her mother, Gloria. "She's a very smart woman, and very competent," he says. Shortly after the shooting, recalled Kelly, he told Gloria about his need to abandon his assignment in space. But "when I told her mom in the intensive care unit in Tucson that I would most likely not be flying, she said: 'What, are you kidding me? You have to do that.'"
Gloria Giffords recently sent a bulletin to friends from her daughter's bedside in which she said that "Little Miss Over-Achiever" had started lip-synching a few songs of late. Music therapy sessions had "really flipped the switch", she said, to the point that the patient could move her lips along to I Can't Give you Anything but Love, with a group of friends providing the chorus. There was also Happy Birthday to You on 21 February, Mark Kelly's birthday. Gloria reports that as her son-in-law prepares to depart the planet, her daughter is rehearsing Deep in the Heart of Texas.
source : http://www.guardian.co.uk/
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