Sally Ride

by Lynn Sherr

  Sally’s random bursts of energy, combined with her perennial upbeat outlook, likely convinced her that she would make it, that she could be one of the few to beat the odds. It certainly kept her illness off the public radar. I was among the many unaware of her situation. So in April 2012, when I learned I’d be in La Jolla to promote a new book, I emailed her to make a date (and teasingly invited her to come see my slides). Sally responded quickly, setting up a time for us to meet for drinks. I was looking forward to a reunion, and so, apparently was she. But that afternoon, as I arrived in town, I got the following email:

  Yikes—woke up this am with a bad case of stomach flu … just managed to crawl to the computer. Believe me, you don’t want this! I’ll have to cnx [cancel]—but on the bright side, it gives you more time to go over your slides… .

  “She thought she could see you,” Tam says, remembering, “and then didn’t have the energy. If only we had just invited you over.”

  It was the last time I heard from Sally.

  In mid-May she called the CEO of AT&T to tell him she could not join his board, that she had to take care of her health and was hopeful for a recovery. On May 26, she celebrated her sixty-first birthday.

  On June 1, Sally was scheduled to go to Washington, DC, for a MoonKAM conference with kids and teachers, led by Maria Zuber. Instead she delivered a short, cheery statement via Skype. Her appearance startled everyone who knew her. She was just too scrawny, and the wig looked like a wig. Still, no one was told.

  A few days later, she took a car service to a board meeting up the coast in El Segundo for The Aerospace Corporation. Sally had told CEO Wanda Austin that she was ailing (not with cancer) and was resigning, but Austin wouldn’t hear of it, telling her to get better and do whatever she could. Someone at the meeting said she looked quite ill.

  GRACE

  By early July, nearly sixteen months after her diagnosis, Sally was failing fast. She had been weakened by a new round of radiation and by the accumulated assault on her once finely tuned body. “Her ability to tolerate additional therapy was just not there,” Dr. Fanta says. “And that’s when we brought up hospice.”

  Sally was at the doctor’s office in a wheelchair—gaunt, her legs swollen—with Tam at her side. They looked at each other, incredulous. Hospice? They’d thought for sure she would get better. That’s what had kept them going, as the chemicals dripped into her veins and the waves of radiation bombarded her tumor. Even curled up with pain, Sally had been an optimist. “Always positive,” Dr. Fanta agrees, “in the face of such horrific stuff going on and the loss of self-esteem. Because she’s losing muscle mass, and she’s not used to that; she can’t work out. It’s just robbing a little of her day by day. And she was just, sort of, ‘Can’t we slow this down a little?’ ”

  One day she couldn’t make it downstairs for morning tea. Then she couldn’t make it to the next room. Tam ordered a hospital bed and set it up right next to the one they’d shared in the master bedroom, so she could watch over her, and so Sally could watch the glorious sunsets. On the shuttle she’d seen sixteen sunsets every twenty-four hours, as Challenger traversed Earth’s time zones. How many did she have left?

  Tam’s days revolved around keeping Sally comfortable, adjusting the angle of the bed, the position of the covers, the amount of oxygen, washing her hair, rubbing her back. The erosion of Sally’s future, Tam says, never compromised her spirit: “She was still this dignified, proud Sally, still had a sense of humor, still had a sparkle in her eyes. That’s how she chose to view it. That’s about playing the cards you’re dealt in the most positive way.”

  Cancer had also loosened Sally’s reserve. She cried every day. “The walls broke down on her emotions,” Tam says, disconsolate. “With the tears coming down, her lips would shake. And I’d sit by her and try to soothe her; I’d ask her what she was crying about and she’d say, ‘I’m not sure.’ I realize that she was going through a ton emotionally, but never knew how to connect it to words. She couldn’t verbalize her grief. It made me sad that I couldn’t help her more.”

  In the end, Sally did open up, with precious gifts for Tam.

  “You’re my rock,” Tam said to her. “What am I going to do without you?”

  “You’re my rock, too,” Sally said. “I’m not sure you really know that. You’ve helped me over the years as much as I’ve helped you.”

  Tam catches her breath amidst her own tears, and tells me about another “very sweet moment,” in those last few weeks. “I wish I had another twenty-seven years with you,” Sally said. The memory evokes a sad smile. “And that was pretty good for her to be able to say that. It wasn’t five anymore. We’d moved to a new unit.”

  Later that day, as she and Tam clung to each other and focused on the inevitable, Tam said she wanted to hold a celebration of Sally’s life—not a memorial—for family, close friends and colleagues. Sally liked the idea, and planning the event engaged both women’s minds, a welcome respite from their grief. They picked the site, the speakers, the tulips and the open bar. Then Tam went downstairs to do some errands. But the more she thought about it, the more she saw the disconnect: After nearly three decades, how would she identify herself? “I didn’t know who I would be publicly,” she tells me. “How would I say who I was to the people at the celebration? Who was I to Sally?”

  She went back upstairs to share her concerns. Sally listened and then said, “I want you to decide. Whatever you want to say, how much you want to say, is fine with me. It will be all right.” A few hours later she added, “I’ve been thinking things over. Being open about us might be very hard on NASA and the astronaut corps. But I’m okay with that. Whatever you think is right is fine with me.”

  In the moment that mattered most, Sally came through.

  “I thought long and hard,” Tam says, numb with the responsibility, “because here we’d been protecting her as a role model to young girls and boys, and to NASA, protecting her legend, her image. And I had to decide.” Tam consulted with Bear and with Karen Flammer, both of whom urged her to go for it. Another friend wasn’t sure. But Tam was. “I decided that it was time to be open. I’m really proud of being with Sally for twenty-seven years and I’m not going to hide it anymore. I wasn’t sure the world was ready, but it felt important to be honest. Sally’s integrity was impeccable except for this, so it was time be truthful. So I did what I did and I know I had Sally’s blessing on it.”

  Tam sat down to compose Sally’s obituary, eager to frame her life—and Tam’s part in it—accurately, and ready to post on the Sally Ride Science website when it was needed.

  Sally never saw it. It was time to say good-bye.

  At her request, Bear brought her children—Whitney (Sally’s thirty-year-old nephew) and Caitlin (her twenty-four-year-old niece)—for tearful last words.

  Joyce also arrived, for a mournful farewell that, though brief, nonetheless surpassed any mother-daughter encounter they’d had. They spent no more than fifteen minutes together—Sally was drained, and had to rest up for every sentence—but in the Ride family annals, they were huge. After some teasing exchanges, Sally said to Joyce, “Our Norwegian blood notwithstanding, I wanted you to know that I love you.” Joyce’s response was as succinct as ever: “And I, you.” That was all. It was, says Bear, who was there, the first time Sally had told her mother she loved her. And Joyce nearly got there too. That’s what she meant, Bear says. That’s how she did it. “It was really rough on Mom,” Bear says, “but she’s a tough Norwegian.”

  • • •

  With Tam, Sally held nothing back. She told her to sit down, in a chair next to her hospital bed. “I know you know I love you,” Sally said, “but I want you to know how much our relationship means to me—the length of it,” she smiled—“but also how much we love each other, and all the things we’ve done together, all the things we’ve accomplished.” Then they embraced.

  • • •

  Earlier, in a conspiratorial voice, Sally had asked
Dr. Fanta about the end game.

  “You know,” she said, “I want to talk to you about things that I can’t really talk about, maybe that you can’t talk about. When things come to the end, I don’t want to suffer.”

  “Well,” he replied, “we take oaths not to expedite things, but believe me, you’re not going to suffer.” Then, keeping it light, he added, “I thought you were going to tell me about Roswell or Area 51!”

  There were no aliens but plenty of morphine. Sally did not suffer. Even as the cancer depleted her body, a smile brightened her face. At Dr. Fanta’s last visit, the Beatles were playing in the background; as he left the house, Tam came running out with a signed copy of one of the books she and Sally wrote. “Sally knew my daughter’s birthday was coming up,” he says, wistfully. Sally also sent him a note saying, “Thanks for the love.”

  On Saturday, July 21, Dr. Lowy, the surgeon, came by with his nurse and found Sally feeling “very good. She seemed really at peace and content and comfortable. She had so much strength and such an incredible sense of grace about her.” He chatted with her about tennis, and about space, and Sally described the moment during her launch when the solid rockets ignited. “She said it was the only time of her life that she remembered feeling that she wasn’t in control of something,” Dr. Lowy tells me, “and that that was the scariest thing.” And then, he says, she motioned her hands towards the bed and the IV drip and her deteriorated condition, “and she said, pointing, ‘kind of like this.’ ”

  Tam realized that Sally was getting tired, so she stepped in to remind everyone of the time Sally was giving the keynote speech in an auditorium during one of the Sally Ride Science Festivals. When a little girl asked about weightlessness, Sally said, “Imagine that right now you can float, that gravity isn’t holding you down. Everyone in this room would rise out of their seats and keep rising toward the ceiling. And if you wanted, you could push off someone and do somersaults all the way across the room!” It was a magical scene, reliving one of Sally’s happiest moments, and one of the last to penetrate her consciousness. That night, she slipped into a coma.

  • • •

  On Monday, July 23, with one of the hospice nurses by Sally’s side, Bear played Sally’s favorite childhood TV show on her iPhone: Crusader Rabbit, with its jaunty theme song. Later that morning, with Sally’s breathing getting labored, Tam, Bear and Susan gathered around her bed. Tam kissed her and whispered, “I love you.” Bear held her hand. At 10:10 a.m., Sally drew her last breath.

  OUT

  The news of Sally’s death from a brutal cancer startled and saddened the nation. She was still a hero, still the icon, still, at sixty-one, the daring young woman in the flying machine. But for many, the last line of her obituary—the one Tam had written for the company website, the source for every major news report—became the headline: “In addition to Tam O’Shaughnessy, her partner of twenty-seven years, Sally is survived by …”

  The revelation that she was gay touched off a minor shock wave. From the Twitterverse to the blogs to the op-eds and the letters to the editor, reactions ranged from raised eyebrows to outright hostility; from deep pride to spiteful anger. But the seismic shift in public attitudes over the last decades turned the controversy inside out. The loudest resentment to the news about Sally came, not from bigots who were threatened by her sexual orientation (although some few spewed their venom publicly, and I have no doubt others exist), but from some in the LGBT (Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender) community, furious that she had not signed on to promote the cause. How dare Sally not ’fess up and be a gay rights activist! What a loss! It was, according to one advocate who spoke more out of sadness than wrath, “a missed opportunity.”

  I can’t parse this scientifically, and I haven’t tallied up the words, but it is my strong sense from reading many such postings and printed articles that the very wide majority of those weighing in felt quite the opposite; that most believed it was Sally’s choice to make. “How many ceilings is one human expected to crack at a time?” asked one blogger. “Not everything should be about sex,” wrote another. “There really are important accomplishments that people make without needing to bring sex into the picture.” Or, as a creative poster put it, “A great woman passed away—it really doesn’t matter if she was straight, gay, bi, poly, or polyurethane.”

  Bear, who says she was forced out of her job in the ministry when she came out in 1996, defended her sister with a genetic explanation for the famous Ride privacy—“We’re Norwegians”—and a loving salute: “I hope it makes it easier for kids growing up gay that they know that another one of their heroes was like them.”

  Some months later, when she and Joyce visited the California Science Center in Los Angeles to see the mothballed space shuttle Endeavour, “a couple of lesbians accosted Bear,” according to Joyce, “and asked why Sally had never mentioned her sexual orientation. My response was that it probably never occurred to her that it was anybody’s business.”

  I ask Tam if she thinks they both missed the revolution, wondering why they didn’t seem to be aware of the enormous social progress that allowed many same-sex couples to enjoy their lives openly. “I think we were working so hard at Sally Ride Science that we didn’t quite appreciate how much things had changed in the last five years,” she says. “Didn’t appreciate that it probably would have been okay to not be so worried about sponsors.” Tam is grateful that gay rights advocates are out there advocating but defends Sally’s and her own insistence on choosing their own battles. “We were pushing other boundaries in science and math and technology,” she tells me. “So in a way that ended up fulfilling what Sally needed in terms of doing good work to provide more opportunities for more people in our country, and for girls in particular, and minorities. Sally stood up for being true to herself as an athlete, a scientist, an astronaut, and an activist for STEM equality. She chose not to stand up for gay rights. She didn’t want to be defined by the lesbian/gay label just as she didn’t want to be defined by a gender label. We both didn’t like categories, didn’t want to define ourselves by our sexuality. We wanted to be beyond labels.”

  The argument makes more sense when you consider the back story, described by an online supporter with a vivid sense of history: “Cut Sally Ride some slack. She made her career in a type-A, patriotic organization with strong ties to the military. Of course it was hyper-macho and homophobic. 27 years ago was 1985 and the closet was pretty damn full …”

  That’s certainly the NASA I knew, and while it’s changed today, I think it is a key to Sally’s secrecy. When Sally made her deathbed pronouncement to Tam—a dramatic metaphor with the added pathos of truth in this case—she underscored her loyalty to the agency that had launched her career and given her a global platform, an agency that regularly creates miracles, with a wholly deserved reputation for the superhuman. I covered it, I get it, and I agree. NASA is a hero factory with good reason. The scientists and engineers and technicians make “out-of-this-world” an everyday activity. But it is also an agency rooted in military conservatism, where alternative lifestyles were once as welcome as an invasion of the Pod People. “Other” was unacceptable. “Gay” didn’t fly. Of more than 530 individuals of all nationalities who have flown in space since 1961 as of this writing, Sally is the first, and remains the only one, now known publicly to be gay.

  If one proposed rule had gone through, no one else would have had the chance.

  Around 1990, according to Dr. Patricia Santy, the former NASA flight surgeon, management quietly ordered a working group of physicians to list homosexuality as a psychiatrically disqualifying condition for astronauts—even though the medical group pointed out that it was not such a disorder. “The issue was, how do we make sure we don’t accidentally accept any homosexuals? How do we disqualify them?” Dr. Santy tells me. “They were, really, good old boys.” The ban never materialized. One of her physician colleagues at the time, considering the laws of probability, wondered aloud if management real
ized it was likely they had already selected homosexual individuals. Management was aghast.

  Given the fear of AIDS in that era, and the hostile environment of homophobia, no one I spoke to believes that any known gay person would have been selected as an astronaut; nor, certainly, that Sally would have flown on STS-7—or any shuttle—if NASA had known, or thought, she preferred the company of women.

  “Back in 1983 that probably would have been horrible,” agrees Hoot Gibson, Sally’s onetime beau and a five-trip shuttle veteran. “NASA is just terrified about anything controversial. I did the first Mir docking [the first US shuttle rendezvous with the Russian space station] and they were afraid we’d drink vodka with the Russians.”

  “It was not very acceptable back then,” says Rhea Seddon, Gibson’s wife and another of Sally’s TFNG classmates, referring to homosexuality, not alcohol. But, she says, it was largely self-imposed. “I think Sally would have felt badly if she had embarrassed NASA, because we all wanted to do the right thing—so that other people could do it, so there wasn’t any bad press about stuff that was going on.” Image was everything.

  “Could NASA have handled gay?” asks Kathy Sullivan, another TFNG. “I doubt it. But ‘Could they have handled it?’ is only one question. ‘Could they even have contemplated it?’ is another.” Remember, no one ever asked about sex. Sullivan points out the difference in the decades by relating the comment of a friend who dismissed the fuss over Sally’s sexual orientation as irrelevant. “Oh, come on,” she said, “Really? That person, that accomplishment, that’s the best you can do?”

  That’s the big picture, and Paula Levin, Sally’s faculty colleague, agrees regarding Sally’s academic career. “Not UCSD,” says Paula Levin. “They’re indifferent to sexual orientation. But I think Sally Ride Science would have been a disaster, because she was held up as a role model, encouraging girls to be science-oriented and (as Sally always said) to reach for the stars.” Brenda Wilson, the former SRS executive, agrees. “Sally made the right choice. There would have been a whole lot of mothers in the Midwest who wouldn’t have let their daughters go to the festivals.”