Gail Glesener
Her Wisdom
Gail's Impact
Deeply Listen
"She was an amazing listener. 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. And she had a way of making it seem like it wasn’t as big of an issue as you thought it was."
~ Charlie Fontenelle
Take Care of the Earth
"In college she started focusing on the environment and did that rest of her life. She was an outdoors person and the first person I knew to be doing organics. My brothers would go to her house and say, 'do you have anything normal to eat around here?'"
~ Gary Fontenelle
Don't Judge Others
" I just think Gail made everyone feel good about themselves. If you did something wrong, she let you know, but not in a way that you felt bad about yourself. Even me as a teenager having views that I probably shouldn’t have had, she would say, ‘Well, you don’t know how this person grew up or the kind of life they had, so be careful judging them.” It was never ‘I’m going to scold you,’ it was ‘let me help you understand why.’ "
~ Johnny Fontenelle
Put Family First
"She was an excellent mother - she was the mother that I wanted to be in a lot of ways. But she was also a mother figure to her brothers and she was very, very present with Rene. When Rene got cancer at 27 years old, Gail dropped EVERYTHING to go to MD Anderson and be there for her mom and her sister."
~ Bridget Fontenelle
Don't Sweat the Small Stuff
“Gail would just take everything in stride. I don’t remember her losing her temper over anything - ever. She was always just kind of at peace with her life and fine with who she was.”
~ Jack Langlois
Sleep In
“Gail was a HARD sleeper. She loved her some sleep. When she would come into town, do not plan ANYTHING until after 1 p.m.”
~ Rene Brockhoef
Embrace the Adventure
“And on a trip in Alaska we stayed in this house in a remote area and it had an outhouse for a bathroom. Danielle and I were too scared to use it, so my mom pulled out a pot in the kitchen and Danielle and I would just pee in the pot."
~ Lauren Langlois
Never Stop Growing
"I was on Gail’s thesis committee and I worked with her on a lot of things. She was just so intellectually curious and smart and even in our spare leisure time she wanted to talk about psychology. I would have thought both her parents were PhDs.”
~ Dr. David Lane
