Linda Gibson

Linda begins her story not with herself, but with the people she came from. Her great-grandfather, in his 90s, walked through the woods of northern Michigan to help a neighbor build a house on his very last day. Her grandmother on her mother’s side was widowed when her first husband — a U.S. postal stagecoach driver — was murdered for the mail. Left alone with a daughter, she survived by doing laundry and sewing, eventually remarrying and farming in Missouri. When crops failed, the family moved north to Flint, where her grandfather found work at GM. 

Linda frames these stories as a contrast — because she was not strong. As a child, she was afraid of everything: bugs, the dark, other people. So shy that classmates mistook her silence for arrogance, she drifted through school and into young adulthood without a plan, simply letting things happen. 

Marriage brought a new kind of challenge. When her husband lost his job in the late 1970s, they moved in with her parents while he returned to school for a master’s degree in Orientation and Mobility — teaching blind people cane travel. Linda took a waitressing job miles away, working from evening until 1 or 2 AM, coming home to feed and rock their baby back to sleep. Neither of them got much sleep that year. 

The family followed her husband’s career to Chicago and then to Memphis, where the financial strain deepened. With three young boys and daycare costs that made working nearly impossible, Linda stretched $7 in groceries — peanut butter, beans, rice, eggs — to feed a family for ten days. She baked bread. She served soup over rice. She managed. 

After a divorce, Linda was working at Memphis State University when her former husband called to say he had been diagnosed with laryngeal cancer — a tumor wrapped around his vocal cords. Though they were no longer married, she drove to the hospital, helped coordinate his surgery, and eventually asked him to move back in so she and the boys could care for him. She navigated liquid morphine shortages on weekends, fought bureaucratic delays for disability benefits, and held the family together as the cancer spread to his bones. He died on July 5, 1993. 

That was the moment Linda says she truly grew up. With three children and no one else to rely on, she simply did the next task in front of her. She fibbed her way into a job at MSU’s Epidemiology Department by claiming computer skills she didn’t have, then immediately asked her colleagues to teach her. She built a life, one task at a time — just like her grandparents and parents had done before her.