Husband’s Message About Giffords: ‘She’s a Fighter’

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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/17/us/17giffords.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

On a day when Representative Gabrielle Giffords’s condition was upgraded to serious from critical, her husband, Mark Kelly, spoke publicly for the first time on Sunday. He left his wife’s hospital bedside to take the stage at a memorial service for Gabriel Zimmerman, an aide who was killed in the shooting rampage that left Ms. Giffords grievously wounded.

Mr. Kelly told the several hundred mourners gathered in the courtyard at the Tucson Museum of Art that he had just come from the hospital and that his wife was “improving a little bit each day. She’s a fighter.”

“I know someday she’ll get to tell you how she felt about Gabe herself,” Mr. Kelly said.

His wife loved Mr. Zimmerman “like a younger brother,” he said, and was inspired by “his idealism, his strength and his warmth.”