The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life (17 page)

But my little sister was in trouble. I knew this, even if she didn’t. I had read the medical literature given to my parents to help them understand Ruthie’s condition. I had been on the Internet. I knew that very, very few people survive this type of lung cancer. The overwhelming majority don’t make it a year past diagnosis.

Your sister is dying. You have three hours before you have to leave for the airport to go home. You may never see her again. There she is, sitting on the porch next to you. What do you say?

If you’re me, you don’t say anything at first. You simply sit in the winter sunshine, and say
yes, Ruthie, you’re right, it is a beautiful day
. But you know that time may be short, and this is not a time to hold back out of anxiety or embarrassment. You think: these conversations only happen in the movies. They don’t happen—they don’t
have
to happen—in our lives, because things this terrible only happen to other people, and to other families.

But here we are. And time is passing. So, with fear and trembling, you begin.

“Ruthie…” I said, then stopped. I was speechless, and began to cry. She met my tears with tears of her own. She saw I was struggling to get words out, and tried to tell me to be at peace. But I needed to say these things.

“I have to ask you to please forgive me for every bad thing I ever did to you,” I said. “I’m so, so sorry. There are things I did. There are things I should have done but didn’t. And I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine, it’s—” She couldn’t finish the sentence. She flicked her right hand as if dispelling a moth, then grabbed the nape of my neck, pulled me in tight and held me. We cried together, like little children. I do not know what was going through her mind. Me, I was thinking about all the times I had been mean to her, made her cry. The pointless sibling jackassery. I thought too about the invisible walls that had for years separated us. Had I helped build them? What had I done to her that I needed to apologize for? I wanted to talk about these things, to name them, to cast them out and start over.

But that wasn’t Ruthie’s way. She wouldn’t have it. It was gone with a wave of her hand. After a moment we both felt silly, sobbing like that. We separated, and giggled at ourselves.

“I hope you live fifty more years,” I said. “But when you do pass over, please pray for my boys to get along. The only heartbreak of my life with them is that they fight, and nothing works to change that. The problem is so bad with Matthew.”

Ruthie told me that she and Hannah had a difficult relationship for a while, and that she used to yell at her daughter. “When Mike went to Iraq, I stopped that,” she said.

We talked about our children for a bit more. Then we talked about anger, and about how some of us in the family were struggling not to be mad at the Zachary doctor who had been her family physician for many years. We thought that he had downplayed the severity of her symptoms early in this crisis, until she finally was compelled to go see Tim Lindsey for a second opinion.

“Don’t be mad at the doctor, Rod,” she said, gripping my forearm. “I don’t want any of you to be. He couldn’t have found this cancer. Not even the specialists saw it five weeks ago. But oh, I am being taken such good care of now.”

She then spoke with astonishment and gratitude about the compassion shown her by Tim, by Dr. Miletello, by the Lady of the Lake nurses and staff. “They treat two hundred patients in that radiation unit every day,” she said. “Two hundred! Can you believe? And they still find it in themselves to be so kind to me. It’s amazing.”

Ruthie and I talked about the parade of visitors who had flocked to her living room since her diagnosis. I felt protective of her, and eager to help her rest and to spend time with her children before the radiation and the chemo took over her life. But she insisted on seeing everyone, if not for her sake, then for theirs. No matter what I said to encourage her to take it easy, she would not budge on this.

Where did she find the patience? On the way back from New Orleans the day before, Hannah and I agreed that neither of us could be teachers because we both lack the patience her mother had. Ruthie’s determination to see the good in everyone, and not to push back or get mad, had long been a source of befuddlement and annoyance to some of us who loved her. We thought at times she let people take advantage of her because she was unwilling to provoke conflict. Mam and Paw and I talked about this often, even before Ruthie got sick.

“Her class this year is really tough,” Mam told me just that morning. “The other teachers said to her once, ‘How do you put up with them?’ She told them, ‘I love those kids, and maybe they can change.’ ”

It was that simple with Ruthie. But for many of us, that’s the hardest thing in the world. I find it hard to love anybody who’s not lovable. Ruthie found everyone lovable, if not necessarily likable. I never thought about where this instinct came from in her until that awful week, when I saw this habit of Ruthie’s heart in the light of mortality—hers, ours—and in the light of the generosity from all
those she had touched over her lifetime. By the time I made it to Ruthie’s front porch that Saturday morning, I saw my country-mouse sister in a new way. I thought,
What kind of person have we been living with all these years?

Ruthie and I talked for a while longer about the outpouring of support for her, Mike, and the kids. She told me she expected to beat cancer, but it made her happy to hear about people choosing to change their lives because of her story.

“We just don’t know what God’s going to do with this,” she said, matter-of-factly.

Mike drove home from the pharmacy and joined us on the porch. He said while he was in town, he’d run into a friend, who was upset over the news of Ruthie’s cancer. “He said, ‘I have never in my life prayed, but when I heard this news, I prayed twice, dammit.’ ”

Ruthie slapped me on the shoulder. “See?”

It was time for me to leave. On the front porch we held each other again and cried once more. Would this be the last time we would see each other? Would I have time to make it back before she died? Ruthie must have seen in my face the pain these thoughts caused me, because she said, “I hate that you’re having to go through this.”

Typical Ruthie: worried that her cancer is a burden on others.

Putting my hand on her shoulder, I fixed my eyes on my sister’s and said, “You are not walking alone through this. We are all going together, and it’s going to hurt, but we are going to be purified.”

This would be our family’s Lent. There is no Easter without Good Friday.

Driving to the airport I told my parents how all this with Ruthie had knocked me down. After all, in my personal mythology, I was the brave Ulysses, an intrepid adventurer and man of the world who had gone away to make my mark; Ruthie stayed at home and tended her garden. I was the seeker. She was the abider. I never faulted her for that, and had always respected the way she chose to live her life. When
I departed St. Francisville for good in 1994, after my failed attempt at homecoming, I left behind all guilt over choosing to build my life far away from this place. Yes, Ruthie worried about me being so far from home—they all did—but what did a simple country girl from Starhill know about my world?

But now Ruthie had just started a journey unlike any I had ever contemplated, and for which nothing in my wide and vivid experience would have prepared me. But she was ready. She had been preparing all her life.

Since we were children, I knew Ruthie and I were different, but until that week I had never thought about the
way
Ruthie was different. After what I had just seen, I told my parents, I wanted to change the way I was living. To repair broken relationships. To apologize to people I’d offended—even if I had been right. Grudge-holding, I told them, did not matter. What mattered was love, and mercy.

Mam and Paw dropped me off at the Baton Rouge airport. I checked in, went through security, and sat with my thoughts, waiting for my flight.

I resolved to go back to Philadelphia and write to people with whom I was at odds, and to seek reconciliation, because that’s what Ruthie would want. That’s how I was going to share her walk. I would be stuck hundreds of miles away, unable to help, but I could at least do that thing, and do my part to make sure the agonies that awaited her on this sorrowful path were not wasted, but turned to the good. I needed to do the hard work of forgiveness, of putting aside judgment. I needed to love people. They might change. And even if they didn’t, I needed to love them all the same.

That’s what Ruthie would want. And that’s what I was determined to give her.

Before the plane boarded, I wrote on my laptop to Andrew Sullivan, a prominent blogger with whom I had had friendly relations in the
past, but with whom I had lately been publicly fighting over cultural politics. In my e-mail I told him what was happening to my sister, and what an example she had been to me. I asked him to forgive me for my hard-heartedness toward him. He responded in kind. We are destined to disagree, I felt, but we are not destined to be nasty to each other. I e-mailed him the photo of Claire on Ruthie’s shoulder. He posted it to his blog, with prayers for Ruthie.

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.