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

by Rod Dreher

  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 diagn
osed 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.

  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 emailed him the photo of Claire on Ruthie’s shoulder. He posted it to his blog, with prayers for Ruthie.