The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life

by Rod Dreher

  “I’m sick,” she told them. “I’m really sick.”

  “We know,” Abby said. “And we know you know what this is.”

  “We’re going to figure this out,” Ruthie said. She was trying to help them find their footing.

  Abby was full of questions. What’s the next step? What do we do now? She was trying to tame the chaos by imposing structure on it. Mike, though, sat silently next to his wife, trying to figure out what this thing was that had them in its jaws.

  Mam and Paw came into Ruthie’s room, having resolved to be brave, no matter what. They saw Mike and Ruthie sitting in chairs side by side, with their heads bowed, speaking quietly to each other. Mike, lost in contemplation, did not notice them enter. Ruthie lifted her head and smiled.

  Like Dr. Miletello before them, Mam and Paw were astonished by Ruthie’s reaction. This malignant tumor had destroyed their sense of order and calm, but there was their sick child, beaming. They were so frightened, but she was so brave.

  The news hit the West Feliciana community like a cyclone. As the day wore on a hundred or more friends mobbed the hospital. Some offered to move in with the Lemings to care for the children while Ruthie fought this. John Bickham told Paw that he would sell everything he had to pay for Ruthie’s medical bills if it came to that. At the middle school the teachers did their best to get through the day, but kept breaking down. All over town people prepared food and took it by the Leming house, which, this being Starhill, sat unlocked.

  “We were surrounded by so much love,” Mam recalls. “It was the most horrible day of our lives, but we could feel the love of all these good people. There was nothing we could have wanted or needed that wasn’t done before we asked. And they were there. Do you know what that means? People were there.”

  The worst part of the day was over. The second-worst part—telling Ruthie and Mike’s children—was yet to come. According to the plan made before Ruthie went down for surgery, Laura and Tim were to bring the girls down to Our Lady of the Lake to see their mother at day’s end. Earlier in the day Tim spoke to Ruthie and Mike about how they would break the news to the children. They agreed Tim would be the one to do it.

  That afternoon Laura loaded the Leming girls into her SUV. They stopped by the clinic, picked up Tim, and drove south to Baton Rouge.

  Mam met the girls and the Lindseys as they stepped off the elevator on Ruthie’s floor of the hospital. Mam tried to act normal, but her red eyes and puffy face gave her away. Hannah sensed that something was wrong. Tim and the children went into Ruthie’s room. Laura remained outside with Mam and Paw. The girls’ grandparents knew that in a few minutes the Leming girls’ safe, serene childhood would abruptly and cruelly end. Mam and Paw had absorbed so much already, and didn’t think they could bear to witness any more suffering that day.

  Behind the closed door of Ruthie’s hospital room, Mike’s pale, shell-shocked comportment startled Tim. As the girls quietly filed into the room, Mike said not a word to his children, only hugged them.

  Mike sat with Hannah and Bekah on the couch. Claire took her place on the bed next to Ruthie, holding her hand. Abby stood by. Tim sat across from them all in a chair. And then he began.

  “You know, girls, Mama’s been very sick,” he said. “We have been trying to find out what’s going on with her. We know that she’s been feeling really bad, and we’ve been wanting to know what’s wrong so we can make her better. Today we found out that there is cancer in her lung.”

  Hannah and Claire screamed, sobbed, wailed, and keened. Bekah, though, sat silent; at seven, she didn’t understand what was happening. Mike said nothing, only leaned forward with his chin quavering, his swollen and bloodshot eyes somehow producing more tears. Ruthie had tears in her eyes too, but worked to stay strong for the girls. The children clambered onto the bed with their mother.

  “Now that we know what it is, we’re going to do what we can to treat it,” Tim continued, addressing the children. “We’re going to try to do everything in our power, but this is a very bad disease.”

  Then Ruthie spoke. With as much resolution as she could muster, Ruthie commanded, “Girls, we are not going to be angry at God.”

  Tim was floored. Here was Ruthie, hours after receiving an unimaginably vicious blow, taking charge of her family and declaring that rage and doubt will have no quarter in her household.

  One of the children asked Tim, “What does this mean? Can she die?”

  He responded that this was a harsh diagnosis, but only God knew how long any of us had. The road ahead was going to be very tough, he said, but Mama was strong. She had a lot to live for. We were going to help her battle this.

  And then they prayed.

  Tim and Laura took the girls to eat dinner and then back to Starhill. As Tim drove north up Highway 61, past the tank farms, the chemical plants, the cow pastures and battered trailers outside the city’s fringes, he thought about all the different times that he had to deliver bad news to a patient or a patient’s family. This time was different. This was a new side to being a country doctor. The Lemings were friends. He had never had to say something so crushing to little girls whom he knew personally. How would I tell my own children news like this?

  On the drive home that night Hannah, who was in her junior year of high school, talked about how she would not allow herself to go to college, that she would stay home and take care of her mother and her sisters. It didn’t last. The pain and terror of her mother’s situation quickly overwhelmed her, and she threw herself into school and extracurricular activities—things that kept her out of the house and on the go. “After that night,” Tim says, “she started running, and she never stopped.”

  My flight from Philadelphia touched down at the Baton Rouge airport after dark. Our Starhill neighbor John Bickham was waiting for me. He drove me to the hospital. In his quiet, steady way, John briefed me on the events of the day, methodically preparing me for the scene at the hospital.

  “They’ve been hit pretty hard, I’m not going to lie to you,” he said. “But Ruthie’s holding them together. It’s something to see, I tell you.”

  We walked along the hospital corridor toward Ruthie’s room in silence. I prayed quietly and crossed myself before I opened her door. There I saw my sister, lying in her bed, visibly wrung out, her hair greasy and her face tense, with an ugly black incision at the base of her throat. She smiled at me.

  “Well, this is a fine mess,” I said.

  “Isn’t it though?”

  I kissed her and tried not to cry. I stayed only a few minutes. She was clearly exhausted, and needed to sleep. I rode back to Starhill with John. I found Paw in his chair at home, looking feeble and forlorn.

  “Hello, my boy,” he mumbled. I bent and kissed him on his wet cheek. He held me close for longer than usual. Mam was across the way at the Leming house, spending the night with the girls. They were all in Ruthie and Mike’s bed, trying to comfort each other. Mam held Bekah. Hannah and Claire held each other.

  Suddenly Hannah sat upright. “Oh my God, Mam, our Mama is your baby!” A rogue wave of emotion washed over the family. They wept for a long time.

  Ruthie’s doctors wanted to keep her in the hospital for more testing. Meanwhile an endless flood of visitors flowed through her room. Mam and Paw parked their car in the lot across from the hospital entrance that second morning, and saw Baton Rouge Fire Department trucks jamming the semicircular driveway. Said Paw: “You’d have thought the hospital was burning down.”

  Mike’s firefighter colleagues were upstairs in Ruthie’s room and in the hallway, rallying to the Leming family’s side.

  “They were just offering themselves,” Mike says. “If we needed anything, they said, they were there to help us. And it was just nice to have them around then, because we are so close, working the way we work.”

  No small number of Ruthie’s visitors wanted to pray with her—a kind gesture, to be sure, but a cumulatively exhausting one for a woman as physically and emotional
ly strained as Ruthie was then. There was a particularly pious man who had a reputation for long prayers. Word reached Ruthie that he was coming to see her. Several of us talked outside Ruthie’s room, and decided she was too tired to endure this that day. We would intercept Ruthie’s friend when he arrived, and politely ask him to come see her at home, when she had more strength. I stepped into Ruthie’s room to tell her not to worry, that we would handle him.

  “No, Rod, let him come,” she said. “He needs to do this.” And then she told me a few things about her friend’s private suffering that I had not known.

  “If it makes him feel better to pray over me in his own way, then that’s okay,” she said. “It’s something I can do for him. And I’m not going to turn down anybody’s prayers.”

  While my sister seemed to be at peace with her situation, her husband was not. Mike would steal away to the hospital chapel, and sit alone with his thoughts, and his God. It was the only place he could find silence. I don’t understand this, he told God. I don’t understand this at all.

  But God was silent. Mike stayed with Ruthie at the hospital, sleeping on a cot the hospital provided for him. Back home in Starhill I volunteered to stay at the Leming house with the girls so Mam could sleep in her own bed. Hannah and Claire slept in their rooms, but Bekah wanted to be in her mother and father’s bed, where I was sleeping. It had nothing to do with me. Bekah had always been quiet and remote around me. She was the Leming girl who was the most like their father—which is to say, shy and by nature silent. Plus I was a virtual stranger to this child; she had seen me only three or four times a year, and on those visits, she was polite but distant. Truth to tell, I was a little scared of Bekah that night. She was so small, and she had to bear so much now. All she knew was that her mama and daddy were gone from home, and there was a man she barely knew sleeping where Mama was supposed to be. I was as hapless in my anxiety that night as I had been the first time Ruthie passed baby Hannah to me to hold.

  What if I drop her?

  Bekah saved me from my helplessness by quickly falling asleep. I lay in Ruthie’s place in the bed with the lights off and began to pray.

  Till that point I hadn’t allowed myself to give in to my emotions, but there, in Ruthie’s bed, under cover of darkness, I let go. I wept convulsively, and wordlessly demanded that God justify what He had allowed to happen to my sister and her family. I knew that God could not by His nature will evil, but He let this happen for some reason. Why? I screamed silently, tears rushing out of the corners of my eyes.

  Then, suddenly, I became aware of a presence in the bedroom, hovering over the bed. It instantly sobered and quieted me. I had my eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling dimly illuminated by the security lights outside the window. Nothing was visible there. But something—someone—was there. Was it God? Was it an angel? Even now I can’t say. I can’t even say if it was male or female. But I sensed that it was a being of some sort, and that it conveyed authority and strength that was almost physical. It felt as solid, as cool, as serene as a marble altar. Something, or someone, was there.

  I did not hear a word with my ears, but in the half a minute this experience lasted, words formed in my mind. I cannot remember them precisely, but the presence communicated to me that Ruthie would not survive this cancer, but that I should not fear, that all would be well, because this must happen.

  And that was all. The presence departed, leaving me with a sense of calm resignation. If it must be, it must be. But I could not tell anybody but Julie about this, I resolved, because I didn’t want them to lose hope. Then I fell asleep.

  At lunchtime the next day Mike’s buddies took him out to eat. Mam and Paw were in the hospital cafeteria, and Ruthie was in her bathroom, taking a shower. I sat in a chair in her hospital room, fingering my prayer rope. Suddenly, the phone rang. It was the nurse’s station, saying that Ruthie or Mike needed to come down at once to talk to Dr. Miletello on the phone. Mike was gone, I said, and Ruthie is in the shower. There’s no one but me. I’ll be right there.

  Dr. Miletello told me the results from Ruthie’s PET scan were back, and the news was bad. Her brain was covered with cancerous lesions. And there was cancer on her hip bone. They would have to start radiation therapy at once.

  When Ruthie came out of the shower in her new hospital gown, I gave her the news. She looked down at the floor, but showed no emotion. A few minutes later Mike came back from lunch. He sat in a chair in the room. Ruthie rested on her hospital bed, her legs dangling off the side.

  “Tell Mike what Dr. Miletello said,” she directed softly. Her vocal cords had been damaged by the surgery. Though they would heal somewhat, Ruthie’s old voice was gone forever.

  As he absorbed the news Mike shuddered. Ruthie looked at him, her face a portrait of heartbreak and guilt. “I’m sorry,” she rasped. “I was hoping for better news.”

  Abby turned up shortly before the nurses came to take Ruthie to radiation therapy. “Come with me,” Ruthie asked Abby, and she agreed. On the journey Abby pummeled the medical personnel with questions. Ruthie asked nothing. My sister was completely, bizarrely, at peace—even when technicians were immobilizing her head with a rigid metal frame.

  “It was like a horrible mask,” Abby says. “They had to keep her head completely still so they could hit the right points in the brain with the radiation. I was totally freaked out just looking at it. But Ruthie—you should have seen how calm she was. If it bothered her, she didn’t let on. From the very beginning she made her mind up that she was going to do whatever it took to get better, and that was that. She had this plain, unemotional determination to endure whatever they threw at her.”

  On the way to radiation therapy Ruthie and Abby had run into a young man they knew from back home who was on the hospital staff. While Ruthie was receiving radiation, Abby found the man and asked him what he could tell her about Ruthie’s condition.

  “I’ve seen her stuff, and it’s not my place to tell her this, but it’s pretty bad,” he said.

  “How long does this give her?” Abby asked.

  “In cases like this? Three months.”

  Ruthie never asked how much time she had, or for any details about the severity of her cancer. From the moment she awoke on her hospital bed from the surgery, she told her doctors she did not want to know. Ruthie was a numbers person and knew herself well enough to be certain that facts and figures would destroy her will to fight the cancer.

  “Ruthie was a researcher, but I’m telling you, from that first day forward, she didn’t read any literature, she didn’t look anything up,” says Abby. “She just trusted the doctors.”

  Tim reached the hospital while Ruthie was in radiation, and spoke by phone with Dr. Miletello, who was preparing to meet with Ruthie and Mike after she finished her session. Dr. Miletello had convened a meeting of his oncology team to study Ruthie’s case and devise a treatment strategy.

  “Bad illness, Tim,” he said. “But I have fallen in love with this family, and I am going to do everything in my power to fight this thing.”

  Later that day Dr. Miletello saw Ruthie for the first time since the morning of her surgery. Mike was with her. The doctor knew Ruthie didn’t want to talk prognosis. If she had, he would have told her this cancer was incurable, and in her case it was so far advanced that she could be dead in six weeks to two months. But he couldn’t say that to her. Rather Dr. Miletello told her as much as he could within the bounds of the rules she set that first morning. Ruthie learned in detail that she had stage IV non-small-cell cancer—the worst—that had spread throughout her lungs, her brain, and to her hip bone. Worse, Ruthie would have to complete a course of radiation to stop the brain lesions from growing before it was safe to begin chemotherapy.

  Dr. Miletello was struck by the solidarity between Ruthie and Mike, and how calm they were as he gave them the grim news.

  “She was very accepting, she was not angry. She never cried. She was almost unemotional,” he says. “You go into some
people’s rooms and you walk out, and before you can tell them much of anything, they have fifty questions they want to ask. And it’s everything you just got through telling them, but they hadn’t listened. It was not like that with Ruthie and Mike. It wasn’t because they were naive. It was that they were more focused on each other.”

  “Ruthie just turned this over to her doctors, and to God,” he says.

  When I kissed Ruthie goodnight at the end of my third day home, she told me how much she loved seeing me getting closer to her girls. I had never had the opportunity to spend much time with them, because my visits had always been so short. But now I was with the children a lot—and Ruthie wanted me to know how happy that made her.

  Tim Lindsey walked me to the hospital’s parking garage. We talked about all we had seen from and around Ruthie since the morning of her diagnosis. Tim and I agreed that there was something profound, even uncanny, about what Ruthie was revealing to us all. She was showing us how to suffer.

  “However long she has to live,” said Tim, “whether it’s weeks or years or decades, her children will always remember the courage their mother showed.”

  God knows we would all rather have had this cup pass by Ruthie. But even as the darkness increased around her, the light increased that much more.

  The next morning, Friday, the girls skipped school and came down to see their mother in the hospital. Ruthie sat in a chair in the sunlight next to the window, talking cheerfully to her visitors. Claire sat next to Ruthie, nestled her head on her mother’s left shoulder, and gazed out the window as Ruthie spoke to the others.

  The sunlight fell on Claire’s eyes, making them appear illuminated from within. She stared dreamily into the distance, a woozy half smile on her face. A wisp of her chestnut-brown hair dangled over her forehead. Claire appeared utterly lost in time, softly swooning, like a religious mystic rapt in the ecstasy of adoration. Ruthie didn’t notice Claire—she was busy conversing with her visitors—but it didn’t matter. Indeed the most striking thing about the image was that neither mother nor daughter saw each other. Claire simply felt her calming presence, and it was enough to help the young girl see past the pain and the terror that now besieged her family.