The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life (15 page)

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 emotionally 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.