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Saturday, June 11, 2011

GABRIELLE GIFFORDS: “A PLACE FAR AWAY FROM HERE”


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A daily look at war, sports, and everything in between, by Amy Davidson.

JUNE 9, 2011



How is Gabrielle Giffords, and where is she headed? The Arizona Republichas an interview with Pia Carusone, a member of the Congresswoman’s staff; her tone isn’t rough, but the reality she presents is. “We do a lot of inferring with her because her communication skills have been impacted the most,” Carusone said.
“She’s living. She’s alive. But if she were to plateau today, and this was as far as she gets, it would not be nearly the quality of life she had before,” Carusone said. “There’s no comparison. All that we can hope for is that she won’t plateau today and that she’ll keep going and that when she does plateau, it will be at a place far away from here.”
One gets the sense, reading the interview, that those immediately around Giffords are realistic, while the rest of us, perhaps, have been dreaming a little. Giffords is alive, and that’s something; she was shot in the face in January, and six people around her were killed. Last month, she was able travel to see her husband, Mark Kelly, blast into outer space; surely she could get to a place farther away, too—a trip that would bring her back to public life, or something like it. She had a song dedicated to her at a U2 concert, during which Kelly, by video, quoted David Bowie. (“Tell my wife I love her very much.”) She has until next May to file the necessary papers if she wants to run for reëlection. But Causone did not hedge when asked whether Giffords was even close to ready to return to Congress; the answer was no.
The Republic asked Carusone if Giffords was able to speak in “complete sentences”; again, no. Carusone:
She is borrowing upon other ways of communicating. Her words are back more and more now, but she’s still using facial expressions as a way to express. Pointing. Gesturing. Add it all together, and she’s able to express the basics of what she wants or needs. But, when it comes to a bigger and more complex thought that requires words, that’s where she’s had the trouble.
We’ve heard so much this week about surfeits of words and tweets; statements and apologies; how easy it is to talk to too many people while saying both too much and nothing useful at all. One can also have a conversation in a room in a rehab center, and a truer one, even if the sentences are so fractured that, at times, a hundred and forty characters worth of words might seem ambitious. To be alive and surrounded by people who love you is a remarkable place to be, and there is doubtless more to learn, in what Giffords succeeds in saying, than in a dozen overly long press conferences. That doesn’t mean she will ever return to Congress


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