The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life (23 page)

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 know 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.”

Tim also phoned in a prescription for a medicine cancer patients call “magic mouthwash,” which takes away pain from mouth ulcers. A few nights later Tim received a text from Ruthie:

Magic mouthwash is wonderful! I’ve also been taking Lortab more, which helps. If only there were something for hand and foot syndrome, I would be set.;) THANK YOU FOR ALWAYS CHECKING ON ME!

Around the same time I made my customary phone call to Mam and Paw on my way in to the office one morning. Mam was in an especially anxious mood.

“Ruthie told us she’s been having dreams,” Mam said. “Julia came to her, and Mullay, and Dede.” These were, respectively, Mam’s sister, who died of cancer at forty-two, and our paternal grandparents, both long dead.

“What did they say in the dreams?” I asked Mam.

“Nothing. Ruthie said they just smiled at her.”

I thought,
They’re coming to help her get ready to die.

That night I called Ruthie to confirm the story.

“Yeah, they came,” she said, as matter-of-factly as if the deceased kinfolks had dropped by for coffee.

“All at once?” I asked.

“No, I had three dreams.”

“What did they say?”

“Nothing. They just smiled at me, and looked real peaceful.”

“Do you think maybe they’ve come to, you know, prepare you for something?” I said, uneasily.

“Nope,” she said. “I really don’t think so.”

I believed these dreams were real, but I did not believe they were meaningless. Back in 1990, when my mom’s sister Julia was in the hospital being treated for cancer, my paternal grandmother Mullay, dead for fourteen years, came to me in a vivid dream. She told me to go to Julia and tell her death was nothing to fear. I did as I was told. Julia was gone within days.

This is why I took Ruthie’s dreams seriously, even if she didn’t. I believed she was going to die soon. But when? Would I have time to see her? I hoped so. I wanted to save my vacation time and my money for one last visit from our family. Maybe Christmas? Yes, Christmas.

On Monday, September 12, I called Ruthie to check on her. “I’m feeling pretty good,” she told me, which I knew was a lie. As usual she didn’t want me to worry.

We talked about Hannah. I told her I was worried that Hannah wasn’t coming home often enough. Though she had been at college for only a few weeks, Hannah had spent most of the summer at camp and at the beach, away from her mother. Now, even though her mother was in steep physical decline, and her dorm at LSU was only half an hour away, Hannah never came.

Judging by my conversations with Mam and Paw, and the eerie dreams, I was concerned that Ruthie could die any day, leaving Hannah crushed with regret and self-recrimination. But I didn’t dare speak that plainly to Ruthie.

“Oh, don’t be worried,” Ruthie said dismissively. “Hannah’s doing what she needs to be doing. I want her to be at college, having fun.”

I knew this wasn’t true either. Mam and Paw had shared with me their worries over how much Ruthie missed seeing Hannah. But I also knew that Ruthie had intentionally made it easy on Hannah to run from the catastrophe at home. She didn’t want Hannah to suffer.
But how much will Hannah suffer if you die and she didn’t come home?
I thought.

I phoned Hannah the next night, determined to urge her to go home to see her mother. I knew it was a delicate matter, and if she told Ruthie I had intervened, Ruthie would fuss at me. After talking about her classes, and how she was adjusting to college life, I asked her how often she was able to go home to see her mom.

“I don’t want to talk about it, Uncle Rod!” she shot back. “Just stop!”

I tried again, but she cut me off. The girl was plainly terrified. There was nothing left to say.

The next day Julie and I went with the kids out to the rolling hills of Bucks County, north of Philadelphia, to look at a Colonial-era farmhouse we were thinking of renting. It seemed like a perfect place for us, and our family was excited about the prospect of moving out of the city. We loved the house and the grounds, and left it that afternoon assuming that signing the lease was a formality we could execute in a day or two.

Down in Louisiana Ruthie spent that day with Claire and Rebekah, who had the day off from school. Stephanie Lemoine, her chemo buddy, texted her that morning inviting her to come to Baton Rouge that night for a women’s spirituality class and talk led by Sister Dulce at her retreat center chapel. Ruthie and Mike had been to see Sister once since their first visit. Sister had prayed that time with Ruthie, and asked that God’s will be done. That day in September Ruthie thought it might do her good to be with Sister again. Sister always made her feel good.

Ruthie texted Abby to ask if she would be willing to drive. Abby was all in. The best friends had not seen much of each other in recent months. Abby had met a man, a lawyer named Doug Cochran, and
fallen in love. Doug lived in Baton Rouge, which meant Abby was around St. Francisville less often. Ruthie was thrilled for Abby, but it was hard not to see Abby’s smiling face and hear her sassy talk as often. When they spoke Ruthie confessed to Abby that she was tired and lonely. Nobody was coming around to see her much anymore. My sister was alone for long stretches of the day when Mike was at work and the girls were at school.

When Abby came by that evening, Mike showed her how to work Ruthie’s oxygen tank. By that point, Ruthie could barely breathe on her own. And off they went to Baton Rouge.

“All the way down, we talked about how she was feeling, her chemo, and the chemo nurses,” Abby recalls. “We talked about all her friends—the ones who came to see her, and the ones who couldn’t make it.”

Ruthie was exhausted, and feeling miserable. Abby dropped her and her oxygen tank off at the chapel door, and drove off to park the car. Stephanie had arrived earlier, and saved a seat for Ruthie in the back of the chapel so Ruthie could leave easily if she became too tired.

“All of a sudden, I felt a little light tap on my shoulder, and I turned around, and there was that angel’s face,” Stephanie remembers.

Ruthie, Abby, and Stephanie sat together, and listened to Sister Dulce’s talk. Neither Abby nor Stephanie remembers what the nun said. When she finished Stephanie asked Ruthie if she would like Sister to pray over her. Ruthie said she would.

Sister ran her hands under Ruthie’s shirt to feel her body. “We need to get you well,” the nun said. “Honey, you can’t worry about this cancer.”

“No, ma’am,” Ruthie said. “I’m not.”

Sister prayed quietly over Ruthie, then said good-bye. After the service Abby brought the car around to pick up Ruthie, who was standing at the chapel door talking to Stephanie.

“Ruthie,” Stephanie said, “I don’t know why we met, but I know we met for a reason.”

Ruthie smiled, and said, “It’s God.”

On the drive home Ruthie was animated, even excited.

“Wasn’t it weird how Sister talked about all the things we talked about on the way down?” Ruthie asked.

Abby wasn’t sure what Ruthie meant, or even if they had heard the same talk. To Abby it had been simply a general sermon about the spiritual life. Ruthie, though, believed Sister answered all the questions weighing on her mind that night, and that that had been an incredible grace.

That night in bed Ruthie and Mike stayed up late talking about Sister Dulce.

“She was feeling so bad. It wasn’t an easy trip, but it was a good one for her,” Mike says. “She told me that Sister is an amazing woman, and the things she talked about made her feel peaceful.”