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

by Rod Dreher

  Mam broke up, and excused herself. I sat there with Julie, and told my wife, “That lady, Miss Clophine, has had an unbelievably hard life, and my mother is one of the only people in this world who treated her with dignity and compassion. That’s my Mama.”

  I was so proud of her. Mam wouldn’t know how to be any other way. I shared that story with Ruthie the next morning. She told me that she learned from our mother the wisdom of refusing to return cruelty with meanness. “Don’t you remember, Rod, the stories about how Aunt Rita and Mullay”—Paw’s mother—“would be so nasty to Mama, trying to put her down and make her feel like dirt?” said Ruthie. “She never fought back, and she kept doing nice things for them when they needed it.”

  That summer vacation in Louisiana was the first time our kids visited their aunt since her diagnosis. It was hard on them to see her without hair. Her cancer was abstract to them until then. Though I was grateful for the week we spent with Ruthie, I worried about Lucas, my middle child. He was only six, and was by far the closest of my children to Aunt Ruthie.

  Lucas, always an early riser, appointed himself to run out to the road, pick up Aunt Ruthie’s newspaper, and deliver it to her. Blond head bobbing, he would dash across the grass, wet with morning dew, let himself in to Ruthie’s house, and, newspaper in hand, climb into bed with her. Every night in Starhill—every single night—Julie and I would have to answer Lucas’s questions about cancer, almost always the same ones, and then listen to his ideas about how to save Aunt Ruthie from this disease.

  “Could Aunt Ruthie swallow some tiny thing that could go through her body and zap all the cancer?” he said one night.

  “What if, like, Aunt Ruthie’s doctor got some lasers and blasted through her skin and destroyed the tumors?” he said on another.

  There was always in Lucas’s mind some potential Star Wars–style solution to Ruthie’s illness. He was sure that if only the doctors would think hard enough, they could figure out a way to fix his aunt. And they would, sooner or later, because she couldn’t die. That sort of thing did not happen, not in this world.

  Lucas wasn’t the only one struggling on this trip. On our final night at Mam and Paw’s, I stepped into our bedroom and found our four-year-old daughter Nora lying on a mattress, staring at the ceiling, scowling.

  “What’s wrong, baby?” I said.

  “Nothing.”

  “No, something is wrong. Are you upset?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sad?”

  “No!”

  I stretched out on the floor next to her mattress and put my head next to hers.

  “Is this because you love your family down here?”

  “Yes!” she cried. She threw her right arm around my neck, buried her head in my shoulder, and wept.

  The next morning, as Julie and I packed the suitcases, Lucas asked if he could take Aunt Ruthie her paper one more time. Fine with us, we told him, but take care, because Aunt Ruthie might be sleeping.

  To our great lack of surprise, the kid didn’t come home for an hour. Ruthie told me later that he had padded softly down the hall to her darkened bedroom, newspaper tucked under his arm, and poked his head in. “He told me that he listens to hear if I’m coughing, and if he does, he knows I’m awake,” she said. “He brings me my paper, asks if I want a Popsicle, anything I want. My little buddy takes care of me.”

  That last morning he climbed into bed with her again, and stayed close for as long as he could. He was thinking that if he could be there to guard Aunt Ruthie, nothing bad would happen to her.

  Back home in Philadelphia that night, I carried that sobbing, keening little boy to bed. “Why did we have to leave?” he wailed. “I want to stay there. I love them so much.”

  A week after our return, we had some news from Ruthie. She saw Dr. Miletello for results from a new CT scan. She texted me:

  Tumor got smaller! Fluid in lung almost gone. Dr. Miletello was very excited. Your prayers are working. Please keep it up. Love, Ruthie

  Tumor got smaller! The only three words I could think of at that moment that would have sounded sweeter were “I am cured.” But when you’re dealing with stage IV cancer, you take what you can get.

  Truth to tell Ruthie really was doing a lot better. So I allowed myself to hope that maybe Ruthie would be one of the tiny number of non-small-cell lung cancer patients—one percent—who make it five years or longer. Only two percent of lung cancer cases occur in people forty-five years old or younger; might Ruthie not be as lucky now as she was unlucky before? Perhaps she would achieve her goal of surviving until Hannah’s high school graduation in 2011.

  Her old schoolmate Stephanie Toney Simpson ran into Ruthie at a football game during Hannah’s senior year.

  “I have been feeling so bad, and I know things have been progressing, and I know things are happening, and I won’t be here as long as I want to be,” she told Stephanie. “I’m asking you to pray for me to stay alive long enough to see Hannah graduate.”

  “I will pray that for you, Ruthie,” Stephanie said. “But I will also pray that God will let you live to see all your girls graduate.”

  “I guess I’m selling myself short, huh?” Ruthie said.

  Every time Stephanie spoke to Ruthie after that, Ruthie would assure her, “I’m going to make it!” Ruthie was still going strong that fall when her family reached an emotional milestone: Hannah was elected homecoming queen of West Feliciana High—just as her mother had been. Mam had been on the school’s homecoming court in her senior year, nearly fifty years earlier. At halftime in the homecoming game, three generations of West Feliciana homecoming royalty stood on the football field together and received honors.

  “It’s quite an exciting thing for an old lady,” Mam joked to a reporter for the Baton Rouge Advocate. “I’m very proud. I’m very humbled.”

  When Christmas came Ruthie wanted everything to be the same as it always had been with her family. She was thin and worn-out, but worked hard to make it a happy time. For many years Ruthie and Mam had had a tradition of lighting candles on every grave in the Starhill cemetery at dusk on Christmas Eve. That year Hannah recruited a few of her high school friends to help her, her mother, and Mam illuminate the darkness of the graveyard. It was for many folks a glorious thing to come home to Starhill after church on Christmas Eve and see hundreds of tiny flames hovering like winter fireflies over the graves of the dead.

  At home the next morning Christmas was, reassuringly, the same as ever. Mike and Ruthie set the girls’ presents out under the tree and phoned Mam and Paw to come over, as usual. And as it had happened every Christmas morning since Hannah was old enough to walk, Mam, Paw, Mike, and Ruthie sat by the tree watching the children run up the hall and see what Santa had left.

  Two weeks into 2011 Ruthie had a new CT scan. Dr. Miletello noted a “marked worsening in the chest.” This was the first time in nearly a year of treatment that Ruthie had not improved. The tumors had grown accustomed to the medicine. It was time for a fresh approach in chemotherapy. The new medicine worked, for a while.

  That May we flew down from Philly for Hannah’s high school graduation. She was the class co-valedictorian. The bleachers overlooking the football field filled with hundreds of parents and family members. We sang the alma mater (“Feliciana sons and daughters / Long have gathered there”), and settled in for the long graduation ritual. I sat next to Ruthie in the bleachers, watching her intently as they called Hannah’s name. I did not see my niece walk across the platform to receive her diploma; I was instead intently studying Ruthie’s face, silently thanking God that she had lived to see this night. As hot and humid as it was that mid-May evening, Ruthie wore a herringbone woolen cap to hide her head, and a heavy purple shawl; in her cancer days even the warmest weather could not banish Ruthie’s enduring chill.

  “Hannah. Ruth. Leming,” the announcer called over the PA. A broad smile bloomed on Ruthie’s withered face. I could only guess what that moment meant to her. By that ti
me, fifteen months after her diagnosis, over eighty percent of lung cancer patients are dead. That night was a stellar triumph for Ruthie. Stephanie Simpson ran into her at the ceremony and said, “You made it!”

  “I did!” Ruthie said. “I did!”

  We celebrated Ruthie’s forty-second birthday that Sunday at Magnolia Café, St. Francisville’s main hangout. The Mag is a rambling old wooden house that sprawls under a shady live oak grove. We all sat at our table in the Mag’s spacious back room—which is to say, on St. Francisville’s screened porch—our iced teas sweating in front of us, trying to forget our fear of the future, and simply to be grateful that Ruthie had lived to see another birthday. Julie and I gave her a triple bouquet of pink, orange, yellow, and purple tulips and a chantilly cream cake topped with berries. Looking today at the photos of that party, the thing you notice is how pinched Ruthie’s face was, especially her eyes. Ruthie was so good at putting everyone at ease that none of us grasped how much physical pain she was in.

  When Dr. Miletello saw her only two weeks later he was seriously troubled by her condition. The tumors had grown a great deal. Once again he would have to try something new. She was so sick by that time that the oncologist had to withhold another round of chemo long enough to give her frail body time to recover.

  “Though I didn’t tell her, that was when I started praying for her to make it to Christmas,” Dr. Miletello says.

  “We weren’t expecting that news,” Mike says. “It was very tough on Ruthie. She thought she was getting better. She was so upset by the shock of it. When the nurse came in to give her a shot, Ruthie broke down in tears.

  Meanwhile Stephanie Lemoine received PET scan news the same day—and hers was upbeat. Her tumors were fading. “I knew she would be happy for me,” Stephanie recalls, “but having gotten a text from her earlier that day with bad news, I couldn’t bring myself to tell her.”

  Stephanie sent Ruthie flowers, then broke the news to her. Ruthie’s response: “Thank you so much for telling me. Your news uplifts me so.”

  Stephanie was cancer-free and had no need to return to the chemo room. But she kept going every week—for Ruthie’s appointments. She refused to leave her friend’s side.

  In that fateful June visit Dr. Miletello urged Ruthie and Mike to go on a family vacation before she began a new round of chemotherapy. What he didn’t say was that if and when this next chemo regimen failed, there would be nothing left for Ruthie but hospice care. Ruthie and Mike gathered their girls around the kitchen table in Starhill and brainstormed. What about the East Coast? Ruthie had always wanted to go to the East Coast. True, she had visited us in New York City when Claire was a baby, but that didn’t really count. She wanted to feel the Atlantic on her bare feet. In late July they picked Charleston, South Carolina, pointed their big black Ford eastward, and drove.

  Hannah remembers the drive as difficult, and not just because smoke from Florida marsh fires that summer made breathing especially hard for Ruthie.

  In the car Hannah felt the tension between her mother and herself. It was the same old things: the rebelliousness, the anxiety, the fear, the anger, the boyfriend with a bad attitude. Even if Hannah could have articulated her problems, she couldn’t have spoken them aloud.

  “Mom, why can’t we just be happy?” Hannah would say.

  “I don’t know,” Ruthie would reply, “Why can’t we just be happy?”

  They went on like this, all the way to South Carolina.

  The Lemings arrived in Charleston, checked into a hotel, and set out to explore the harbor and the historic downtown. One afternoon Ruthie stayed in the upstairs bedroom of their suite, too tired to sightsee. Mike, Claire, and Rebekah went for a walk. Hannah sat alone in the courtyard, overwhelmed by sadness.

  There was her mother, upstairs in the hotel suite. There she was, downstairs, alone, isolated. They were on vacation together and couldn’t stand to be in the same room. Why? A fresh wave of anger welled up in Hannah’s heart, and broke across her face in tears.

  Ruthie saw her role as fixer of her family’s problems. Hannah wanted her mother to quit trying to fix things and simply to listen to her. Ruthie found this difficult. That afternoon in Charleston Hannah slipped back inside the hotel room and climbed into her bed to sob. Ruthie heard her come in, let herself into her daughter’s room, and sat on the edge of the bed.

  Ruthie said nothing, only rubbed her oldest child’s back, just like she had done throughout Hannah’s childhood whenever Hannah was inconsolable. She didn’t try to fix anything. She just caressed the distraught young woman, her firstborn. What must Ruthie have thought, drawing her thin, cold, dry hands across her daughter’s supple back? Did she remember that she too had been in South Carolina in her seventeenth summer, in a hotel room near Fort Jackson, there to see Mike graduate from basic training? How different her life was from Hannah’s at seventeen. Back then Ruthie felt at home in the world as she found it, had met the man she knew she would marry, and had her life set out before her. Ruthie possessed a confidence—rare in a seventeen-year-old—that comes from knowing who she was and what she wanted from life. And now Ruthie and her family could barely see the road in front of them.

  Finally, in the cool of her hotel bedroom, Hannah opened her heart to her mother.

  She confessed that she had been lying to Ruthie and Mike about where she had been going when she left the house. She had been secretly meeting the boyfriend she had been forbidden to see, and felt guilty about it.

  “Mama, I’ve been so ungrateful for you,” she cried. “I know how much you love me, and I’m so ashamed of the way I’ve been acting. Mama, I can’t—I just love you so much. I love you so, so much, Mama.” Hannah also disclosed to Ruthie how much anxiety and self-loathing she lived with. How she would go to bed at night tormented by her sins and failings. Ruthie was shocked.

  “I had no idea, I had no idea,” Ruthie said to her daughter. “How do you live like that? I can’t believe you had to go through this, and I didn’t know.”

  Things were better after that. That night at dinner they held each other’s hand. They were connected again. Was it perfect? No. But the healing had begun.

  After four days in Charleston the family drove out to Hilton Head and hit the beach. Everyone agrees that the rest of the vacation was wonderful. Though Ruthie’s stark physical decline was undeniable, Mike wouldn’t allow himself to think that this might be the family’s last vacation together. These thoughts usually came to him driving home from chemo treatments, when Ruthie would fall asleep in the truck. His mind would wander. I could be left here by myself, he would think. As a firefighter his vocation is to save lives. Watching the love of his life taken, bit by bit, by death left Mike, a strapping, six-foot-tall war hero, feeling humiliated by powerlessness.

  He banished these thoughts at Hilton Head. All he allowed himself to see was the sun, the sand, his true love and their girls. All he allowed himself to see was the blessing of the present moment. That’s what Ruthie wanted.

  As summer ripened and faded toward fall my morning and evening calls to Mam and Paw took on a darker, more desperate tone. At Ruthie’s house one afternoon, Mam rubbed her back to comfort her, and nearly withdrew her hand in shock; she could feel the sharp edge of Ruthie’s bones through her shirt. Ruthie took such care to keep up appearances, and was often successful, through her genial spirit and clever sleight-of-wardrobe, in making everyone around her disbelieve their eyes. But she could not lie to her mother’s hands.

  The phone message to me from Starhill was the same, day after day: We’re losing her.

  One late summer afternoon after Sunday dinner, Ruthie and Mam sat on Mam’s back porch, by themselves. Ruthie sat quietly, staring at the ground. Mam could tell she had something on her mind. Then a single tear rolled down Ruthie’s right cheek.

  “Mama,” Ruthie said, “if things don’t work out like we want them to, I need to know that you will help Mike raise our girls.”

  “Ruthie, you kno
w I would. You don’t even have to ask.”

  “No, I need to hear you say it.”

  Mam made that vow.

  “Good. I just needed to hear you say it, Mama.”

  One early September afternoon Ruthie’s feet hurt intensely, so Mam sat with her on the couch at Ruthie’s place, massaging her daughter’s feet. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, they both burst into tears. Not a word passed between them. Several minutes later mother and daughter gathered themselves, wiped their eyes, and resumed their conversation.

  “Ruthie,” Mam said resolutely, “this does not mean your mama is giving up hope.”

  “Me neither, Mama. We just needed to cry.”

  That August Hannah moved into the dorm at LSU to start her first year of college. Ruthie was thrilled that Hannah had settled on LSU, because it was so close to home. She wanted to be part of Hannah’s big moving day. “I hope Hannah’s not on the third floor,” Ruthie told Mam that morning. “But if she is, Mike says he’ll carry me up the stairs, and I’ll help her get the room set up.”

  As it turned out Hannah’s room was on the ground floor. But Ruthie was still so exhausted after walking from the parking lot that she could only sit quietly while Hannah and her father carried her things in.

  By then Ruthie could no longer hide how much she was hurting. Tim Lindsey checked in to ask if she needed more pain medication. He had given her a prescription for Lortab, a strong, hydrocodone-based painkiller, months earlier. She barely used it.

  “I’m so nervous about that stuff,” Ruthie told her doctor. “I just don’t want to get used to the Lortab.”

  “Ruthie!” said Tim, shocked that a cancer patient as advanced as she was would worry about addiction. “Ruthie! Are you hurting?”

  “Yeah, I’m hurting.”

  “Do they help?”

  “Oh yeah, they help. I just don’t want to take more than one a day.”

  “What pharmacy do you use, because I’m calling it in.”