When I was 5 or 6 years old Gail was a teenager and was asked to babysit a lot.  Because my mom was called out of the house a lot, with seven kids and always having to run kids here and there.  So Gail was instrumental when my mother wasn’t there and Gail would be the one playing mom and saying “what are you doing watching cartoons?”  Both my mom and dad graduated from college and so education was always really valued and Gail really valued school and everyday she’d put us on the bus and pick us up.  She’d help me with school work and when she got her driver's license she became the taxi driver.  I was probably about 7 when we moved to Jackson and Gail would drive me around.  She was like a second mom to me and was my closest sibling until later on in life.  As a child, I turned to Gail for everything.  And when Wayne would be mean to me, I would cry out for Gail.  

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So being in my family, Gary and Gail were the prince and princess – literally the homecoming Queen and King in Jackson, MS.  They were both 4.0 students.  Back then my father, Roy, was real involved in the family and he was a good father.  The heavy drinking hadn’t started yet.  But it was because of his job we moved around so much. 

Dad had bought a house in Green Acres, I was born and within one year he gets transferred to St. Louis.  Then to Cleveland when I was 3.  And Roy was the hit of the neighborhood.  He hosted all the parties and we’d go see sports and baseball games.  So when I was six there were five of us and we were tight knit.  In Cleveland we lived in a brand new neighborhood around a pond and my dad would take me fishing at that pond and I became his fishing and hunting buddy.  And Gail was the pretty girl who was so smart and going off on trips in the summer that she had won.  Eventually we moved back to New Orleans, something we all wanted to do because we were always here for the holidays, and we made a lot of Mardi Gras trips as kids.  And when we moved back, Gail would go off to “Girls State” because of how smart she was. 

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When I first moved to college, things really started to get hard with my family because my dad started being unfaithful.  My mom would turn to Gail — they were that close but obviously that was hard for my mother and all very hard on Gail.  And when I was a Freshmen in college, Gail comes over and tells me that dad is having an affair and that he’s an alcoholic.  My dad was my hero so I couldn’t and wouldn’t believe it.  And so she got upset and she whipped out this book about alcoholism.  And I said “enough.”  She thought it was her mission to inform me about this and then I didn’t see her for a month or two.  So I finally read the book and I have to start admitting to myself that my dad IS an alcoholic and wondering if he was having an affair.  I think it was a burden for Gail and she felt like - at some point - it became her job to tell me.  And she had seen a counselor and was telling me I should see a counselor, because the book said that if your father was an alcoholic that you had a 90 percent chance of becoming one and that’s why she wanted me to read it.  She felt like she had to protect me and look out for me.

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She just always seemed to know the right thing to say and how to say it.  If you were to talk to some of my friends, every one of them would have said that she was one of the most personable and kindest people I ever met.  She always knew their first names and was so damn personable.  She’d meet you once and then see you 15 years later and would remember your name…she’d say, “Oh so-so, Charlie tells me you got a divorce, how are you?”  

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I mean, when I was in college at LSU the number of people that I met who knew Gail and would say, “Oh my god, your Gail’s sister?!” — and she never even went there!  I was just blown away at the impression she made on a LOT of people. 

So Jack was still at LSU going to law school when she went to Knoxville to get her graduate degree. And then I was a senior in college when Jack graduated law school and they both went to Paris.  So this was about 1979 or 1980.  Then they came back and immediately went to Houston and she got her doctorate from RICE, and actually got sexually harassed by a professor from what I understand she wasn’t having it and sort of the blew the whistle.  But she was such a good student and had so many people in her corner that she had support and still graduated and everything, but I got the feeling that it was a traumatic experience for her.  But she was always putting herself out there and back then men didn’t like powerful or impressive women in the professional world.  

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She was actually having babies while she was getting her PhD, Danielle was born.  Can you believe that?  I guess she was juggling a LOT in Houston and things started to break down and then next thing she’s moving to Boulder with just her and the two girls, Danielle and Lauren.  And Wayne goes out there and the two of them live together.  Wayne and Gail were REALLY close and Wayne wanted to protect her all the time.  Wayne had graduated law school and even when through all the trouble to take the bar and get licensed in Colorado.  Gail and Gary always had a great relationship too.  And the whole family went up there to Colorado to see her.

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It was just such a pleasure just to sit down and talk to Gail.  You could go 2-3 years without seeing her but when she was there, it was just great.  Going to visit Gail in Colorado and having her with you at the condo skiing is like being with a long-lost friend.  It wasn’t just like going to see your sister, it was much more than that.  She was such an interesting person.  She was a trained listener.  And she always seemed to have the right answer.  Or she would listen and listen and listen and say, “Gee it sounds to me like you already have the answer.”  She would allow you to figure your problem out.  She had a way of making it seem like it wasn’t as big of an issue as you thought it was.   She would never, ever in any way try to demean anyone in the room, the OPPOSITE she would go out of her way to make the person more acceptable - even though she was the smartest person in the room.  She would shift the conversation to make sure everyone could be a part of it.  

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So she stayed in Colorado and built her whole career with her industrial psychology degree, even at one point they were sending her to India because her job was to take the computer program that a company had bought for huge telephone centers in India, and to break it down and figure out new protocols that would help them process these calls. 

But the scariest thing and the time I’ll always remember going out there to see her was when she got so sick and went her into coma, and she was out for two weeks.  Mark was trying to keep the kids from knowing just bad and serious it was, and I go out there and go straight to the hospital and I was actually the one standing there when she woke up.  And they took her off the drip and she just looked me and said, “What are you doing here?”  

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She had to go through intense physical therapy to re-learn how to walk, etc. - and she came out of it and we thought we were out of the woods.  But I’ll never forget this because the doctor shows up when Gail came out of the coma and says, “well, the key here is we don’t know how long she was running a fever and there very well could be some brain damage that we don’t know about yet.” 

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And years later Lauren was at Loyola and I called her and she was down, and I didn’t know what was going on.  And I called Danielle and found out that Gail hadn’t called Lauren on her birthday.  And from that point on, it was like “oh, shit.” I just knew something was wrong. They stopped sending her to India because she was messing up so much.  Then she said, Mark is making good money so I am going to step back and work at this nursery and they had to let her go her because she wasn’t showing up.  

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The problem with her personality and not wanting anyone to worry about her, she would not tell the truth about what was actually going on.  One Christmas she finally has lunch with us and tells us that she is going to get a divorce because Mark was on drugs.  From the lunch on, Wayne wanted to do the divorce because he had a Colorado law license.  But Gail’s good friend talked him into letting a local lawyer do it. Wayne was adamant that this was going to destroy Mark’s life.  Gary and I were sort of soft-selling Gail but Wayne was different, just absolutely adamant.  The whole thing turned into a mess, with the first attempt at divorce failing, and If Wayne had been alive, I just don’t think it would have played out that way. 

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But Gail would just ALWAYS put other people ahead of her.  Going all the way back to being a kid.  And the saddest part of all of this is that towards the end, and she was fighting whether she should get a divorce or not get a divorce and I would call her after and she’d just be crying and she said you don’t know what it’s like to see a death of a marriage, and how she wasn’t ready to let this marriage go.  It was something that was just unbelievably hard for her. 

So when we she finally the got the divorce and we got her back to New Orleans, I rented the house for her and everyone wanted to give me the credit but I want to believe that my siblings would do it for me.  And I know Gail would have.

Those last years with the dementia were just so hard, seeing her like that.  You have to understand, I never met anyone like Gail before. She was the smartest and kindest person ever.  Gail could sit in a room with anyone - men, women, didn’t matter -  and talk and relate and make everyone laugh.  Some people are so intelligent that they don’t “get” other people, but was one of those people that could come down to anyone’s level and make you feel like you were the star of the day.