Mark Kelly
A Newfound Mission
“His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
On January 8, 2011, U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords was outside a Safeway supermarket speaking to constituents in an event she called “Congress on Your Corner.” It was typical of the Arizona congresswoman to reach out directly to the people of her district, learning about the issues that mattered most to them. Within the crowd was a young man named Jared Loughner. Without warning, he drew a handgun and shot Representative Giffords through the head. Then he turned his gun on the rest of the crowd. The shooting rampage took the lives of six and left another thirteen injured. Giffords’s husband, Mark Kelly, was in the middle of his training for his last space shuttle flight when he was informed of the assassination attempt on his wife. He immediately rushed to her side.
As the commander of the final flight of the space shuttle Endeavour, Mark had been trained to manage stressful missions with high stakes. He was now focused on the survival and recovery of his wife. His new mission allowed him little time to dwell on the man who had caused this tragedy. “I didn’t have time to be incredibly bitter about this individual. It would’ve been a big time suck, which was the last thing I needed. I just had to focus on, ‘What do I need to do right now to help Gabby and deal with this situation?’” Mark is aware that his reaction was unusual. From the first instant, he treated the shooting as an event in the past and kept his attention locked on his wife’s immediate needs and future recovery. He never shied from the task at hand, and he never let anger drain his energy. “The individual who did this was almost a nonfactor. At this point, he doesn’t matter. Absent of creating a time machine, you’re not gonna fix this problem. It’s not gonna go away.” He ignored Loughner and focused instead on his wife. “Jared Loughner was somebody else’s problem. That was the problem of the United States Attorney and the FBI at that point. That’s their thing to worry about. I didn’t even think about it.” Mark’s ability to see the shooter as irrelevant to the mission at hand—Gabby’s recovery—shows his remarkable discipline.
Eight years after the attack, Mark is still fully dedicated to his wife’s recovery. He told me that he never experienced any stages in the path toward forgiveness. His focus has always been on his wife; he doesn’t let himself become distracted by feelings toward Loughner. The shooting is in the past, and carrying any negativity forward would take away from the positivity needed to ensure his wife’s healing. “I didn’t have the time to deal with it. I just was kind of like, ‘Move on.’”
Once Gabby was released from the hospital, she needed to decide whether she would continue with her career in Congress. In the early days of 2012, Gabby reluctantly accepted that she was no longer able to serve her constituents as she had in the past, and so she resigned. Although she was out of the hospital, she was still going in for care every day for another six months, meeting with various doctors. As a new sense of normalcy emerged, Mark was finally able to take a breath. After his wife’s resignation in January 2012, Mark recalls a feeling of relief, unclouded by thoughts of revenge. “It just felt like a new dawn. When you ask about forgiveness—if I had forgiven this guy—it never came up. It was never something that I considered was important, necessary, something I needed to do because I’d just moved on. He’s in jail. Never gonna hear from him again.”
If Mark’s single-minded focus on his wife’s recovery kept him from having thoughts of rage and revenge, it has also kept him from having thoughts of forgiveness. “If you would’ve asked me if I’d forgiven him, I would say: I don’t even consider that as a thing. For me, it doesn’t matter. I didn’t have time.” Mark’s ability to control his thoughts may seem almost superhuman, but he remains deeply empathetic, even toward his wife’s attacker. When Mark considers Loughner’s motivations, he says, “He was mentally ill, which, for me, is a factor here.” Instead of fixating on his wife’s attacker, he directs his frustration at the system for failing a young man who so clearly needed help. Mark feels that if Jared had been given the proper care for his mental illness, the tragedy might have been avoided. Still, thoughts of resentment and revenge don’t come easily to Mark, and so he doesn’t feel the same need that so many of us have to untangle our emotions after a trauma.
For many of us, the act of forgiveness is a necessary step in order to move beyond a traumatic incident; it allows us to release any anger that might be holding us back, tying us to the pain, and trapping us in our darkest moments. For Mark, this process came quickly and naturally, through an act of will: “I don’t allow myself to be angry. Because not only did this individual do this and forever change Gabby’s life and the lives of the six people killed and thirteen injured, but in a sense he is also continuing to have an effect on me—and I won’t allow that to happen.” Mark recognizes that holding on to anger would only distract him from the needs of his wife. Like her husband, Gabby does not hold resentment toward the man who shot her. It’s in the character of both Mark and Gabby to be forgiving people, but it’s also a deliberate choice.
As the years have passed, Mark has stayed true to his mission. He tries to focus his energy on the present, rather than on a past he is unable to change. He has never let the shooting take away from the love and joy he shares with his wife. Since then, he and Gabby have focused their attention on making sure something like this does not happen again. They have worked hard to raise money and awareness to pass stronger gun laws. In fact, Mark is now running for the Senate in Arizona to enact further change. “We’re trying to take this horrible thing that happened to Gabby and turn it into some lives saved, especially little kids.”
Mark was able to shed the past much faster than most of us would be able to should we find ourselves in a similar situation. Though it’s important to go at your own pace, what I took away from his experience is that, sometimes, refocusing your energy can be a positive way forward, ensuring that you don’t stay stuck in an event from the past. Instead of grappling with anger and resentment, he focused his thoughts on the task at hand: helping his wife recover. I think most of us, myself included, would say that it’s easier said than done, but Mark’s is a method of coping that we can certainly admire and aspire to.
I’m sure we would all like to be able to follow in Mark’s footsteps by training our minds to focus on the positive things we can do in the wake of a tragedy—I know I would. Even if I should stumble at times, it will always inspire me to know that people like Mark have worked toward recovery—directing their energy away from a past they cannot change and toward a more hopeful future for us all.