Darkness Visible

Jenny was the kind of friend who never forgot a birthday and who would tell you, in the kindest way possible, which wedding dress was right for you and which one wasn’t. She was so confident about her own style and judgment she could cut her own hair, coordinate the construction of dream homes for Southern Living magazine, and decorate them with lights made from minnow buckets. She was the rare job candidate who didn’t just mail a thank-you note, she sent a plant in a perfect terra cotta pot, with a note that read, “Plant me in your office.”

Friends say Jenny bloomed wherever she was.
She was a student leader and a standout athlete in the Wayzata public schools, where she and her fraternal twin sister, Becky, may have had an unfair advantage in the statewide synchronized swim meet they won in eighth grade. “It was like they could read each other’s minds,” recalls childhood friend Laura Baum. “I remember once, when Jenny fell off a curb and hurt her leg, Becky was the one who cried. They were like a matched set.”

When the pair graduated from Wayzata High School in 1993, they went on to Louisiana State University, where Becky had won a swimming scholarship and Jenny took the role of team manager, earned a master’s degree, and eventually married Chip Bankston, “that cute boy” (as she described him to her parents) on the men’s swim team. When Becky became a professional triathlete, Jenny cheered her rise up the ranks of the country’s top female competitors, crafting the glittering Go Becky! signs their friends hoisted along the course. When Becky won an event, Jenny teased that having shared a womb now meant that her sister ought to share her winnings. “She did love to shop,” recalls their mother, Sandy Gibbs.

While Jenny’s husband attended medical school in New Orleans, she took a job at an ad agency, along with an unpaid position as the firm’s social director, organizing “fresh flower Mondays” and margarita nights when she thought her co-workers could use a lift. By the time the couple moved to Birmingham, Alabama, where Chip was resident in orthopedic surgery, Jenny had taken her morale-boosting to a new level, sending daily inspirational quotations via e-mail that colleagues at Southern Progress Corporation, the Time Warner subsidiary that publishes Southern Living and other magazines, signed up to receive. She drew from sources as varied as Lance Armstrong and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the aphorism she taped to her refrigerator captured their general tone: Whatever you are, be a good one.

She may have needed the motivating messages herself during what turned out to be a trying first pregnancy. Morning sickness lasted for seven months, followed by Bell’s palsy, a temporary facial paralysis that made her usually wide smile a little lopsided. Even so, she was buoyant at the baby shower her sister and mother threw in July 2007, announcing to her friends—five of whom were pregnant too—that she and Chip had chosen their son’s name more than three months ahead of deadline. Though she joked about scheduling a cesarean section so she could stay on a predictable schedule, Graham Bankston arrived naturally enough on November 1, 2007. To her friends back home, she reported that childbirth was not as painful as she feared. “I highly recommend it,” she said.

In the weeks that followed, Jenny took pictures of her baby, sent e-mails to her friends, tried to sleep, and struggled to find time with her husband, who was cycling through a six-week rotation in a hospital trauma unit. She took Ruby, her beloved golden retriever, for walks, chatted happily with neighbors who stopped by to admire her son, and hosted Becky (who now lives in California with her husband, Brian Lavelle) and brother, Randy Gibbs, who came to visit in November. She hung a Christmas wreath on the front door, took Graham to his first checkup, and sent her mother home after a three-week stay.