by Rod Dreher
On Sunday morning I woke up and checked the comments on my own blog before getting ready for church. This is what I found from a reader:
Dear Ruthie and Mr. Mike,
I was your nurse for only 12 hours. I had six other patients that night, but you were the only one who smiled through tears after having received the worst news. I googled your name in hopes of finding your address so that I could write you, and I happened upon this site. I can see now that it’s not just my life that you have touched in just a few short hours.
I have been a nurse for more than two years and I have to say I have seen some things. Good and bad. You and your story will be one that will not be forgotten. I will always keep you and your outlook close to my heart. I kept asking myself that night, why God? Why does the worst always have to happen to those who are truly good?
I’ve always questioned God’s intentions and my faith, especially in my line of work. And here you are asking your daughters not to be angry at Him. You’re an amazing woman. You’ll never know how deep you have struck the chords of my own heart. Ruthie, meeting you and seeing your heart was the miracle I needed to remember to trust God and live life instead of being bitter.
You reminded me that God is like the wind. You cannot see it but you can feel it and you know He is there. I do not have the right words, I do not know the best doctor or the right treatment. This is the part of my job that frustrates me. All options are exhausted and I feel my hands are tied. All I can do is pray and I will pray for you and family. I only pray that the Lord God will give you the miracle you need.
—Crystal Renfroe
See?
CHAPTER EIGHT
Standing in the Spirit of God
That first cancer weekend at home, Ruthie retreated to Paw’s pond with Mike, their children, and their fishing poles. Nestled in the embrace of a pine grove, the pond, no wider across than a strong man could throw a stone, had always been Ruthie’s refuge. And now she had returned once more, to gather herself before undertaking the fight for her life.
John Bickham knew what chemotherapy would do to Ruthie’s body. He understood that this afternoon would likely be the last time the Lemings would be together, looking like themselves. He asked Mike for permission to linger unobtrusively among the pines, taking photographs of their day together. He thought these pictures might mean something to them one day. Mike agreed. That day John took a shot of Ruthie in a black tracksuit, pole in hand, line in the water, inside a hazy golden ball. It was probably a trick of light on the lens, but it looks for all the world as if Ruthie at that moment was literally dwelling within light.
“I know I’m standing right in the middle of God’s will, where he wants me to be,” Ruthie told me by phone on Sunday night, after I’d returned home to Philly. Though her breathing was labored, she sounded so sure of herself.
For Ruthie, standing in the middle of God’s will was as easy as casting for bass. For her tortured, unsettled brother, it was not so simple. Several years earlier I had broken camp and continued my religious sojourn, leaving the Roman Catholic church and settling among Orthodox Christians. Five years of thinking and writing about the Catholic child sex abuse crisis had eroded my ability to believe the claims of the Roman church.
At the beginning of my journalistic writing about the scandal, Father Tom Doyle, a heroic Catholic priest who destroyed his own brilliant clerical career to speak out on behalf of abuse victims, warned me to proceed with great caution.
“If you go down this path,” he said, “it will take you to places darker than you ever imagined.”
Maybe so, I reasoned, but what choice do I have? I can’t turn away from this story, neither as a journalist nor as a Catholic layman and father. I had assumed that as long as I had the theological arguments straight in my head, my Catholic faith could withstand anything.
Had I taken Father Doyle’s warning more seriously, I would have prepared myself better for the descent into the scandal’s consuming blackness. I had too much faith in my own reason, and in my capacity to think on these grim facts and events without losing my spiritual equilibrium. Five years later, in 2006, the anger, fear, and loathing within me at the Catholic bishops who had allowed this corruption to flourish eventually overcame the intellectual foundations of my Catholic faith—and, I worried, threatened my ability to believe in Christianity at all. For my wife and me, from a theological point of view, Orthodoxy was the only place left to go.
Leaving Catholicism—or, to be more accurate, having my Catholicism torn out of me—was the most painful thing I’ve ever gone through. I don’t know what my sister thought of this, but if she gave it any thought at all, she probably figured it was more of her flighty brother’s churchy nonsense.
Becoming acquainted with the Orthodox way of approaching God—a more mystical, less intellectual method—helped me understand how and why I had allowed the storm of scandal to leave me shipwrecked. And the image of Ruthie standing in the light called to mind a story I had learned about St. Seraphim of Sarov, a Russian Orthodox monk and mystic of the early nineteenth century. In the Bible figures who are dwelling within the will of God—Moses on Mount Sinai, Jesus on Mount Tabor—are seen by followers enveloped by dazzling light. The monk Seraphim is believed to have shown this to Nikolai Motovilov, a religious seeker who came to visit him at his forest hermitage near the rural town of Sarov.
Motovilov wrote that the elder explained to him that the purpose of living a Christian life is not to say prayers, fast, receive the sacraments, and go to church. Those things, rather, are good only if they help one “acquire the Holy Spirit.” On that day in the snow outside of Sarov, Motovilov asked Seraphim to explain what he meant by this. Seraphim took his guest by the shoulders and said: “We are both in the Spirit of God now, my son. Why don’t you look at me?”
Seraphim’s face and clothing had become a luminous white, shining so bright it hurt the seeker’s eyes to look at him. The saint told Motovilov that he too was in the shining. This, he explained, is what it means to be illuminated by grace. Seraphim told the young man to go into the world and tell what was revealed to him so that others might believe more deeply. Said the elder, “The Lord seeks a heart full to overflowing with love for God and our neighbor.”
Whether John Bickham’s camera captured something mystical about my sister, or more likely caught the sun’s rays at an odd angle, there was no doubt in my mind that I was seeing the beginning of a transfiguration within Ruthie. The week before she was, to my eyes, just my sister. She was a kind, happy, loving country girl, certainly, and a friend to all—and that was more than enough. But now I began to suspect that something else was going on, that there was more to Ruthie than I had imagined—and that it was slowly being revealed.
Was I guilty of imposing a story I wanted to see and needed to hear on an ordinary cancer patient’s experience? Maybe. Or maybe I was seeing grace. Whatever the truth, my skepticism was not strong enough to prevent me from reaching out to an estranged Louisiana cousin and asking his forgiveness for hurtful things I had said and done many years earlier when we were on opposite sides of a political fight. He graciously accepted my apology, and offered one of his own. We agreed that what we had seen these past few days in and around Ruthie had given us a new vision of life, and how we could live together as a family, in spite of our past.
It is an awesome thing to realize that forgiveness is always possible to offer, and to receive. Ruthie was no more special or kind or loving today than she was the week before, the month before, or the year before. The only difference was that we now knew that she was really sick. It took this catastrophe of cancer to make me see Ruthie as she truly was—and to see myself as having the opportunity to live within that purifying light.
I remember thinking at the time: Why is it like that with us? Why do we turn away from the opportunities for grace and mercy, and withhold them from others, who need them as much as we do? Like Motovilov we fallible creatures sometimes need to see somethi
ng amazing to make us grasp that life is a miracle, and that hope and redemption are in all things, every day of our lives, if only we could be humble enough to accept them.
Perhaps God was bringing about harmony and healing of souls through the radical disharmony Ruthie’s cancer was causing in her body. Her ultimate healing—that is, her final reconciliation with God, which might or might not include the healing of her body—would, I thought, depend on her being confident that God’s hand is in whatever happens, and that He will bring good out of it.
Days later Julie flew down to Louisiana to visit Ruthie and do what she could to help the Lemings adjust to their new life. When she returned I mentioned to her that this cancer thing with Ruthie would probably be like 9/11 was for those of us who were living in New York in 2001.
“Remember how we thought nothing would ever be the same again, but everybody eventually got used to it, and got on with their lives?” I said.
“That’s it,” Julie said. “And let me tell you, they’re already there. Ruthie’s house is bubbling over with joy these days. She’s fine. I mean, she’s not fine, she’s got cancer, but she and Mike are dealing with it amazingly well. They’re laughing all the time, enjoying their friends, and even making cancer jokes. They hadn’t gotten around to taking down the Christmas lights from the front porch, so Mike’s calling them ‘cancer awareness lights.’ ”
Julie went to Louisiana with a heavy heart, but returned strangely cheerful. Working at Ruthie’s kitchen table, she collected the small mountain of cards and letters pouring in from family, friends, and people Ruthie barely even knew, and filled a scrapbook with them. She said it was breathtaking to watch Ruthie’s joy, and to see the outpouring of love surrounding the Lemings. She talked about how the “family” from the Baton Rouge Fire Department, as well as the Lindseys, John Bickham, Big Show, and others, were all working together for Ruthie’s sake.
“I kept looking at Ruthie thinking about how I would react if it were happening to me,” she continued. “I told her something like, ‘Okay, I can go organize this for you, and clean up that, and we can get this and that in order.’ And she just looked at me and said, ‘Well, we could. Or we could just sit here and make queso and talk.’ I wanted to wrestle this to the ground, but she was happy just to be.”
Back in Philadelphia I was not as accepting as my sister. I was struggling with Ruthie’s admonition not to be angry at God and to accept her cancer as somehow part of His plan. Ruthie’s hair had begun falling out from the cancer treatment, my folks told me, inspiring Ruthie to have her head shaved. My mother said that the beauty of Ruthie’s face surprised them. Her hair had always been so thick and lustrous, and had given her face such an air of feminine softness, that the architecture of her bones—especially the strength in her high cheekbones—was a revelation.
Cancer may not have broken my sister’s spirit, but it brought with it logistical challenges. Daily life needed to be rearranged. Ruthie had always taken the girls to school. That task fell to Mike, when he was home from work, and otherwise to Mam, mostly. Abby managed the meal-delivery schedule with the community volunteers. Someone had to look after the girls when Mike and Ruthie had to be in Baton Rouge at chemotherapy. Someone had to cut the grass when Mike couldn’t get to it. There always needed to be someone. In Starhill there always was. In a time of great need the Leming family wanted for nothing.
In those early days of treatment, drugs made it difficult for Ruthie to sleep regularly. She passed those lonely hours of the night sitting in her bed, resting against a slope of pillows, praying. She expanded her practice of writing down names of people who had asked for her prayers, or whom she thought needed her prayers. Sometimes these fragmentary lists would be on scraps of paper—whatever she had near to hand when someone had first asked her to pray for them. Ruthie took these requests seriously, and wrote them down so she wouldn’t forget. There she would be, in her sickbed, her chest and her brain riddled with cancer, moving through the endless night with her prayer lists before her, asking God to show mercy to others.
At breakfast one day she told Mike that it was a good morning. He asked why. She said she had had a mysterious encounter the night before.
She had been awake in the middle of the night, praying about her situation. As she was praying Ruthie felt a distinct presence in the room, by the door. She didn’t know what it was, but she continued to pray. The presence lifted a weight from her—Ruthie felt this physically—and then it left. She never talked about who or what she thought it was. She saw no reason to question something that gave her so much comfort and relief. After that night she didn’t worry so much.
Had she known just how critical her medical condition was, Ruthie might have been consumed by anxiety. Mike was curious, but felt bound to honor Ruthie’s strategic decision to remain in the dark. It was hard for others to believe that Ruthie really didn’t know how sick she was, and that she didn’t want to know. Knowing that Ruthie had heavily researched her condition prior to the cancer diagnosis, Abby asked her once if she had gone onto the Internet to look up her form of lung cancer.
“No,” Ruthie said.
“Don’t!” Abby warned. That was all Ruthie needed to hear.
Still I found it difficult to accept that she refused this information. Speaking by phone with Ruthie a month into her chemotherapy, I asked her why doctors hadn’t given her a prognosis. “Do you know all this and you’re just not telling the rest of us?”
“No, not at all,” she replied. “I told them from the start I didn’t want to know those things. Remember, I’m a numbers person, and if I knew the numbers, I wouldn’t be able to get them off my mind. And there’s nothing I can do to change them anyway. I told the doctors to keep that information to themselves, unless they just have to tell me, and to just tell me what I need to do. I’m going to do everything they say to do, and stay positive, and live every day with hope.”
This I never understood. If I had cancer, I’d demand to know everything at once, on the theory that information is power. And then, me being me, I would surely brood over it incessantly. Ruthie, on the other hand, figured that information would be disempowering. She understood that she was in some respects living an illusion, but if she was going to live at all, she had to be able to curtain off the terror of death. She was walking a tightrope stretched high over a chasm, and could not afford to look down, not for a single second.
Dr. Miletello, Ruthie’s oncologist, saw wisdom in Ruthie’s approach. He has had patients who didn’t enjoy their lives at all, spending every waking moment second-guessing their doctors and seeking out second and third opinions at every turn. In the end these people end up getting worse care.
“They can never let go,” he says. “And they spend what time they have looking for something else, some new secret, some new doctor who’s supposedly going to help them beat this. Nothing can make them happy because they’re looking for something that’s not there.”
To underscore his point Dr. Miletello told a story about two patients he’d had fifteen years ago, diagnosed on the same day with the same kind of tumor, at the same stage of development. One lived three months; the other lived three and a half years.
“It was all up here,” he said, tapping his head. “One guy walked out of here and said, ‘You said I have cancer, and if the treatment doesn’t work, I’ll be dead in a year.’ The other guy said, ‘I’ve got better things to do than to die from cancer.’ He dedicated himself to living life to the fullest, right up to the very end. The first guy, he worried the whole time, and spent the three months before he died in bed. Comparing those two taught me right there: My God, this is what you can do with the right attitude.”
In March, as word spread of Ruthie’s cancer, the town continued to rally around the Leming family. One firefighter approached Mike and with tears in his eyes opened his wallet, turned it upside down, and shook every bill out of it. He told Mike that he was sick that he couldn’t do anything more to help, and he hope
d this would be enough.
Meanwhile at the middle school Ruthie’s class—the one that had been the worst-behaved of her entire career—had undergone a change of heart. At a school assembly a girl named Lyric Haynes—a profoundly impoverished child whose mother was in prison, and who was one of Ruthie’s most challenging students—stood and made a short speech. All the teachers knew how hard Lyric’s life was, and how much courage it took for her to go before the entire school to make a presentation.
“This is about Mrs. Leming,” Lyric said. “As you all heard, Mrs. Leming has lung cancer. She always wants us to do good for ourselves, and make the right decisions. Now that she isn’t teaching here anymore, we are trying to make her proud.
“She used to go head over heels for us, and now we are going to do the same for her,” Lyric continued. “Mrs. Leming, you are the best, and we love you very much. You will always be in our hearts.”
Ruthie loved that. She told me once on the phone that her cancer opened the door to experiences of others, and of their goodness, that she wouldn’t have otherwise had. “All this love,” she mused. “It’s unbelievable how blessed I am.”
Good things kept happening. Mike’s firefighter colleagues planned to host two chicken-dinner fund-raisers (in the end, that effort raised twelve thousand dollars). And some other friends were planning a fund-raising concert called Leming-Aid in April.
The Leming-Aid concert started when Starhill neighbor Mel Percy, Baton Rouge firefighter Robert Triche, and David Morgan, Ronnie’s son, decided that they wanted to do something to ease Mike’s and Ruthie’s minds about their finances. Ruthie was a public school teacher, Mike a firefighter. They didn’t have a lot of extra money coming in during the good times, and these were not good times.
