The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life (18 page)

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 something 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.”