The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life (16 page)

“Bad illness, Tim,” he said. “But I have fallen in love with this family, and I am going to do everything in my power to fight this thing.”

Later that day Dr. Miletello saw Ruthie for the first time since the morning of her surgery. Mike was with her. The doctor knew Ruthie didn’t want to talk prognosis. If she had, he would have told her this cancer was incurable, and in her case it was so far advanced that she could be dead in six weeks to two months. But he couldn’t say that to her. Rather Dr. Miletello told her as much as he could within the bounds of the rules she set that first morning. Ruthie learned in detail that she had stage IV non-small-cell cancer—the worst—that had spread throughout her lungs, her brain, and to her hip bone. Worse, Ruthie would have to complete a course of radiation to stop the brain lesions from growing before it was safe to begin chemotherapy.

Dr. Miletello was struck by the solidarity between Ruthie and Mike, and how calm they were as he gave them the grim news.

“She was very accepting, she was not angry. She never cried. She was almost unemotional,” he says. “You go into some people’s rooms and you walk out, and before you can tell them much of anything, they have fifty questions they want to ask. And it’s everything you just got through telling them, but they hadn’t listened. It was not like that with Ruthie and Mike. It wasn’t because they were naive. It was that they were more focused on each other.”

“Ruthie just turned this over to her doctors, and to God,” he says.

When I kissed Ruthie goodnight at the end of my third day home, she told me how much she loved seeing me getting closer to her girls. I had never had the opportunity to spend much time with them, because my visits had always been so short. But now I was with the children a lot—and Ruthie wanted me to know how happy that made her.

Tim Lindsey walked me to the hospital’s parking garage. We talked about all we had seen from and around Ruthie since the morning of her diagnosis. Tim and I agreed that there was something profound, even uncanny, about what Ruthie was revealing to us all. She was showing us how to suffer.

“However long she has to live,” said Tim, “whether it’s weeks or
years or decades, her children will always remember the courage their mother showed.”

God knows we would all rather have had this cup pass by Ruthie. But even as the darkness increased around her, the light increased that much more.

The next morning, Friday, the girls skipped school and came down to see their mother in the hospital. Ruthie sat in a chair in the sunlight next to the window, talking cheerfully to her visitors. Claire sat next to Ruthie, nestled her head on her mother’s left shoulder, and gazed out the window as Ruthie spoke to the others.

The sunlight fell on Claire’s eyes, making them appear illuminated from within. She stared dreamily into the distance, a woozy half smile on her face. A wisp of her chestnut-brown hair dangled over her forehead. Claire appeared utterly lost in time, softly swooning, like a religious mystic rapt in the ecstasy of adoration. Ruthie didn’t notice Claire—she was busy conversing with her visitors—but it didn’t matter. Indeed the most striking thing about the image was that neither mother nor daughter saw each other. Claire simply felt her calming presence, and it was enough to help the young girl see past the pain and the terror that now besieged her family.

It was one of the most arresting icons of the spiritual power of a mother’s love that I have ever seen. I quickly captured the image with my iPhone.

Over the next year I would stare at the photo and contemplate the look on Claire’s face. She was only ten years old, and had no real idea what her mother and her family were about to go through. This is tragic, I thought at first. She doesn’t know what time will do to her family. This was the last moment of innocence before the disease began to disfigure her mother. But I came to regard the image more hopefully. There is a purity and a timelessness in that little girl’s face
that nothing, not even suffering unto death, can tarnish or destroy. That child, resting in the primal simplicity of her love for her mother, saw with the eyes of her heart into a deeper reality.

That afternoon Laura Lindsey came down with art supplies for Claire and Bekah to make posters to decorate their mother’s hospital room. Sensing that Hannah might be too old for an art project, I asked her if she wanted to take a trip with me to New Orleans, to the tomb shrine of Francis X. Seelos, a nineteenth-century Roman Catholic priest thought by many to be a saint. She was desperate to get away from the scene at the hospital. “Let’s go,” she said tersely.

I didn’t expect to have this time with Hannah, and was grateful for it. In a way we had become closer when she hit the midpoint of her teenage years and found herself bored and yearning for escape from St. Francisville. From afar I tried to give her comfort and understanding, or, failing that, at least suggestions for good things to read. But there was distance between us too. On our visits to Starhill Hannah always seemed to be out with her friends. It seemed that she was happy for me to play the cool uncle, but only at a certain remove.

As we drove down I-10, rolling across concrete bridges high above the cypress swamps, my Methodist niece told me she had no idea what a saint was, and why we were going to light candles at one’s grave. I had been living inside the world of saints and relics for so long that I had lost touch with how strange and exotic all this must seem to a girl raised in our family’s religious tradition. The earthshaking news of her mother’s cancer jostled open the door to Hannah’s mind, such that she found herself on a pilgrimage that would have been unimaginable only a week ago. As her guide I had to improvise a quick catechism.

Catholic and Orthodox Christians, I explained, believe that anyone who lives in heaven is a saint. Some saints are officially recognized by the church. The saints are alive and able to pray for us in a special way, because they are already in heaven. Some saints here on earth,
or in heaven after their death, I explained, are thought to have worked miracles of healing, through the power of God.

“They say that’s how it was with Father Seelos,” I said.

Francis Xavier Seelos was a German missionary priest and mystic who volunteered to serve in 1860s New Orleans because the disease-ridden subtropical city was considered a hardship assignment. Not long after he arrived yet another yellow fever epidemic swept the city. Father Seelos ministered to its victims and succumbed to the illness himself in 1867. He was forty-eight. His congregation buried him in Our Lady of the Assumption Church on Constance Street, where he served.

“His big message was that whatever crosses God sends us, we have to try to embrace them with a joyful heart,” I told Hannah. “I’m going to ask him to pray for our family to do this.”

“Why don’t you just ask God yourself?” she asked. “I mean, why do you have to pray to a saint? That’s weird to me.”

“Well, if I ask you to pray for me, is that weird?”

“No.”

“It’s the same deal with the saints. They’re alive in heaven. Don’t you believe that if we ask people in heaven to pray for us, they will, the same way all the people in St. Francisville have been praying for your mom?”

“I guess so,” she said. “But why do you have to go to Father Seelos’s grave to ask him to pray for us? If he’s in heaven, couldn’t he hear us from anywhere?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said. “But there’s just something about making the trip. It’s like a pilgrimage. You go to a holy place, where people come to pray, and there’s just something powerful about it. The thing about Father Seelos’s grave, people have been going there for a long time to pray for cures. Some of them say they got them.”

“How do we know that?” she said, skeptically. The edge in her voice was very Ruthie Leming.

“I’m not sure,” I confessed. “But a while ago the Vatican started investigating Father Seelos’s case, to see if these miracles were real. There was this one account of a New Orleans lady whose liver had been destroyed by cancer. She had two weeks to live, but her liver grew back after she prayed to Father Seelos. Doctors who studied her case said there was no way medical science could explain what happened to her. That’s the case the church used to beatify Father Seelos ten years ago.”

“What’s ‘beatify’ mean?”

“That’s the first step to becoming a saint.”

“So you think Father Seelos will pray for Mama to be cured?”

“Yeah, I do,” I said. Then, remembering my experience with the presence in Ruthie’s room, I added, “If it’s God’s will. All we can do is hope and pray, and trust.”

We parked on the street outside the Seelos shrine in the old Irish Channel neighborhood, between the Garden District and downtown. The crown of a lone palm tree loomed over the church garden, and beyond it the parish’s nineteenth-century tower stood tall over the church’s copper roof. We walked past the garden’s magnolia trees and palmettos, and into the narthex, or church entrance, where the shrine is. We stood there before Father Seelos’s remains, which are interred in a large wooden reliquary, gold-plated and bejeweled, shaped like a house with a steeply pitched, scallop-tiled roof. Some of the beatified priest’s personal belongings line the walls, illuminated by flickering candles lit by pilgrims.

We too lit candles, and prayed for Ruthie’s cure. Before we left I obtained some relics of Father Seelos for Ruthie to keep by her bedside.

“What’s that for?” Hannah asked.

“These are things that belonged to Father Seelos,” I said. “The idea is that in some mysterious way, they have some holiness in them, and they’re good for your mom to keep near her.”

Hannah politely said nothing. I knew that the theology of relics was
too much for a Methodist girl to take. Over the next month, though, several of Ruthie’s friends or acquaintances would give her Seelos relics. Ruthie treasured them all. “You never know,” she told me.

Back in the car I found a message on my mobile from Mam, calling to say the doctors were releasing Ruthie to go home early that afternoon. I texted my cousin Melanie, my uncle Murphy’s daughter, in St. Francisville and asked her to change Ruthie’s bed linens. She not only did that, but she also rounded up other Dreher cousins for an impromptu cleanup session at the Leming place. Thanks to them, Ruthie came home to a tidy house.

Meanwhile at Ruthie’s school, the administration called an afternoon meeting of teachers and staff. It had been a devastating week, and the school’s leaders wanted to offer the opportunity for Ruthie’s colleagues to say what was on their minds. The meeting was voluntary, but not a single soul—not one teacher, not one secretary, not one janitor, not one cafeteria worker—failed to show. They met in the library and stood in a large circle, holding hands. If you wanted to say something, you did. If not, not. When you were done, you squeezed the hand of the person next to you, who spoke, or passed the chance down the line.

Everyone offered a prayer. Just like Mike’s firefighters, Ruthie’s colleagues had her back too.

The sun came up on Saturday and I thought about how I was going to tell my sister good-bye, not knowing if I would ever see her alive again. I asked her for some time alone before I went to the airport.

“Sure,” she said, “Come over.”

We sat down in the sun on her front porch, just the two of us.

“Well,” she began, “I was diagnosed on Tuesday, and the next day was Ash Wednesday. I guess this is my Lent.” Ruthie meant that her cancer fight would be a period for her to reflect and draw closer to God.
The theologian Alexander Schmemann says Orthodox Christians consider Lent to be a time of “bright sadness,” because the contemplation of loss and death, if seen in the right light, paradoxically reveals to us the more important things in life—“and we begin to feel free, light, and happy.” I hoped this would be true for Ruthie. I hoped it would be true for all of us making this terrible pilgrimage with her.

That morning in Starhill the japonicas were in bloom, and a lone paperwhite peered at Ruthie from just beyond the porch rail. It was crazy to think that just one week ago, Ruthie was reveling at the Spanish Town parade. Now she knew her body was being consumed by cancer. She was so beautiful that morning, in the sunshine, and an awful thought crossed my mind:
I’m never going to see her like this again.
She was forty years old, in the prime of her life, glowing with health; the black ridge at the base of her neck where surgeons had gone in was the only sign that something was wrong with her.