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

by Rod Dreher

  Mel called Abby Temple to ask her to approach Ruthie with the idea. Abby thought it was a terrific plan, but Ruthie didn’t like it. She thought she didn’t deserve it. She didn’t want to be a burden to anyone. When Abby told her the concert was a way for people to feel like they were doing something for her—in other words, that by allowing them to put on the show, she was doing them a favor—Ruthie reluctantly consented.

  “Mike and Ruthie were so loved that this was easy,” Mel remembers.

  Nobody had ever asked the parish Parks and Recreation Department for permission to hold a concert in the sports park. When Mel approached the Parks and Rec director with the idea, he said, “Man, no problem.”

  Mel is a Freemason. When he reached out to his brother Masons, they said he could count on them. Then he called a pal who is a sheriff’s deputy and asked if he would help with parking. The deputy told Mel he would help out if it was fine with Sheriff Austin Daniel. Mel called Sheriff Daniel, who told him not only was it okay, but that he would park cars himself if they needed him to. And so on.

  Mel had a reputation for irascibility, but the things he saw began to soften his heart. “It was everybody saying ‘whatever we need to do, you got it, you got it, you got it.’ The brotherly love I saw throughout this process was so humbling, and amazing.”

  “Doors opened everywhere, all over town,” Abby adds. “Anything you asked somebody about, they were there, and wanted to do it. You had tons of people offering to work, any way they could.”

  Abby, Mel, and the other concert organizers wanted Ruthie to use the money raised for something special for her and her family. If she needed it for medical expenses, fine. But if her medical insurance was sufficient (as indeed it turned out to be), then they wanted the Lemings to use that money for a vacation. Says Abby: “She was such a penny-pincher, and hated the idea of being extravagant.”

  Mike had to work an overnight shift at the fire station the night before the concert. Ruthie felt frail and exhausted, and asked Abby to spend the night with her, as she often did when Mike worked the overnight; she was coughing up blood and was frightened. Nearly two months into her cancer treatment, radiation and chemotherapy had wrecked her trim, athletic body. She was so badly swollen that her breasts were leaking, her face was disfigured, she had near constant diarrhea, and she had to use an oxygen tank from time to time.

  I arrived early that Saturday afternoon on a plane from Philadelphia and went straight to Ruthie’s place. I found her sitting in her chair in the living room. She looked like crap.

  “You look like crap,” I said.

  “Yep, it’s the look of cancer!” she snickered in a tiny, crackly voice, and smiled.

  I hugged and kissed my sister and silently thanked God that I had gotten to see her again.

  Late that afternoon I drove Mam and Paw to the large covered barn at the far end of the sports park. We arrived early to get a good parking spot and were surprised by how many people were already there. Volunteers set up the beer, soda, and food stands on either side of the stage. There was a big area down front for dancing, and scores of folding chairs stretching to the back of the barn. At the rear sat a travel trailer, its air conditioner humming. A friend of Ruthie’s brought it to town for the evening so Ruthie could have a cool place to rest and receive oxygen if she needed it.

  By the time the sun went down a crowd of five hundred people milled around under the barn. Suddenly a few people at the far side began to cheer. Everyone turned to see Ruthie and Mike slowly making their way into the arena. Then an enormous whoop broke over the crowd like a thunderclap. Everyone stood, yelled, applauded. Ruthie, her bald head hidden under a baseball cap, brought her hands to her swollen face and stopped, overcome by emotion. Mike, beaming, steadied her and walked toward the front row of chairs. Ruthie sat with her head down for a few minutes, crying and gathering herself before beginning to receive a long line of well-wishers.

  Our folksinger cousin Emily Branton opened the show. After several numbers Emily struck some familiar chords, then sang:

  Hey where did we go,

  Days when the rains came…

  Mike helped Ruthie to her feet, and led his girl to the dance floor. They couldn’t do much, given her shortness of breath, but they held each other close, Ruthie staring up at her husband with her chestnut eyes, smiling broadly through her pain.

  “We love you, Brown Eyed Girl!” Emily called from the stage. Ruthie grinned and waved with both hands.

  David Morgan and his band took the stage after dark and the crowds kept coming. Many people passing through the gates gave far more than the admission price, telling the ticket takers to keep the change. Amanda McKinney, Abby’s sister, had designed a special T-shirt for the event, and organizers had bought so many they despaired of selling them all. As it turned out they ran out early; Abby figured they could have sold four times as many. It never occurred to my sister how many people loved her.

  It was a revelation to me too. I ran into many old friends that night, some of whom I hadn’t seen in twenty years. The three Wilson sisters, who grew up next door to us, came in together. Angela and Susan had driven in from north Louisiana for the show; Teresa, the youngest, came in from Memphis. I hadn’t seen Angela or Teresa for decades.

  “I can’t believe you’re here!” I said.

  “No way we were missing this,” said Angela, now the mother of grown children. The last time I laid eyes on her was as a high school senior dancing in her living room to American Bandstand.

  I met a woman who traveled from Houston, six hours away, for this concert. Ruthie had taught her children when they lived in town, and had meant the world to them.

  “We love her so much,” the woman said. “She has given so much to our family. We couldn’t not be here.”

  I kept hearing this over and over that night: We had to be here. The most touching stories came from people whom Ruthie had taught, or whose kids she had taught. Ruthie disappeared at one point to go rest and get oxygen, attended by Tim Lindsey. David Fournet, an old classmate of hers, stopped me, upset that she might have left before he was able to say hello. “You see her, you tell her I love her. Because I do!” he said, fighting back tears.

  I watched a man who barely knew our family paying for hot dogs with a hundred-dollar bill, and saying, “Keep the change.” My mother observed one woman from a poor family at the show. “I know how little they have,” Mam said, “and they still came to give to Ruthie.” Members of the Baton Rouge Fire Department showed up en masse as a sign of respect for Mike.

  It was an evening of beer drinking, country dancing, and merrymaking, the likes of which there had been far too little of since that awful day in February. For Ruthie this was an It’s a Wonderful Life moment as the people of the parish took the opportunity to show her and tell her what a difference she had made in their lives. At the end of the evening, over a thousand people had come through the gates, and the people of our little country parish had raised forty-three thousand dollars for Ruthie Leming. “This is how it’s supposed to be,” an old friend said to me that night, looking out over the crowd. “This is what folks are supposed to do for each other.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Expecting a Miracle

  After the initial harshness of chemotherapy and the catharsis of the concert, Ruthie and her family finally settled in to everyday life with cancer. Ruthie’s brain lesions retreated, Dr. Miletello adjusted the chemo doses, and her swelling subsided. The main tumor, the one pressuring her superior vena cava, responded well to chemo, and shrank a bit. She looked more like herself again, absent a full head of hair. Inside, though, she was changing in subtle but important ways.

  I was startled but pleased to learn that Ruthie asked Abby to take her down to pray at Father Seelos’s shrine, where I’d taken Hannah right after her mother’s diagnosis. Ruthie had always been prayerful, but not open to new religious experience or practice. She wouldn’t have judged Catholics for their pious customs, but would
n’t have sought those customs out, either. Cancer changed that.

  As word of Ruthie’s cancer spread friends, neighbors, and even virtual strangers threw everything they had at her, spiritually speaking. Protestants sent Bible verses and prayers. Catholics passed along blessed objects, including Father Seelos’s relics, and rosary prayers. In the journal she kept spottily, Ruthie wrote down Scripture passages (“From Uncle Butch: 2 Corinthians 1:3–7”), psalms (“Psalm 91: ‘He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty…’ ”), and specific prayers.

  One day that spring Ruthie finally made it down to the Seelos shrine when Abby drove her to a healing mass.

  Ruthie did not know what was expected of her at the shrine, but wasn’t bothered by it. Before she got sick Ruthie never would have come to a place like this. Too exotic. Too strange. But now she was happy to be here. She made sure to venerate all the relics, to light a candle, and to pray before Father Seelos’s tomb. She spent so much time in preliminary prayer that there were no more seats left in the church for the mass. As she and Abby made their way through the crowd of sick pilgrims to the balcony seating, a woman Ruthie had never seen before walked straight over, looked her in the eyes, and said, “Expect a miracle.”

  “I tell you what, that made me feel so good,” Ruthie told me on the phone that night. “I really got a lot of hope out of that.”

  I was worried that she would read too much into this happenstance.

  “You need to be careful,” I said. “If you get a miracle, it might not be a healing. It might be something else. We don’t know for sure what God’s doing here.”

  “I know,” she said. “But it was still neat to hear.”

  We talked about how cancer was changing her spirituality, and how it was opening her mind and her heart. I mentioned that a Turkish Muslim reader of my blog posted a comment saying he would pray for her. She was so touched by this, and asked me to thank him. “Honey, I’ll take prayers from anybody who’ll give them, because I sure need them.”

  The humility imposed by cancer created an opening for Ruthie, giving her a fresh willingness to accept God’s graces through unfamiliar channels. There was Father Seelos. There was also Sister Dulce.

  If you live in southeast Louisiana and have cancer, sooner or later you are going to hear about Sister Dulce Maria Flores, a Roman Catholic nun living in Baton Rouge, who is said to have a mystical healing gift. The Texas-born nun, a member of the Mercedarian Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament order, believes that the voice of God saved her as a child when she nearly drowned in the Gulf of Mexico while vacationing with her family at the Texas coast. The five-year-old girl had strayed too far from shore, and slipped beneath the waves. Under water and about to lose consciousness, she heard a voice telling her to put one foot in front of the other, and keep walking. She did, and made it to safety.

  Years later Sister Dulce was working in a California mission when she claimed to have had a vision while in prayer. During the mystical experience God imparted a healing gift through her hands—something she said she discovered only after laying them on a woman dying of pancreatic cancer, and finding that she could absorb some of the woman’s pain into her hands.

  In 2000 Sister Dulce found her way to Baton Rouge in response to what she described as a command from “Papa,” the name she used for God. She began visiting with the sick and praying with them. Word spread fast around town that the chubby little Latina nun with the cheerful personality was a vessel of God’s healing mercies. Within a decade she and her supporters opened the Cypress Springs Mercedarian Prayer Center, a chapel, convent, and retreat house in a wooded south Baton Rouge enclave.

  The nun believes that God sometimes heals through her touch. Often the healing is not physical, but a spiritual and emotional closure that allows the terminally ill to reconcile themselves to their condition and die in peace.

  Why would my Methodist sister seek out a Catholic faith healer if she had accepted her fate? The answer is that Ruthie was of two minds about her cancer: if God meant for her to die, then she would accept that. But she was not convinced that this was God’s will. Perhaps this was a test of faith, and He would restore her, if she prayed, and if she believed. That was her hope, anyway—a hope that led her to Sister Dulce’s prayer center early in her cancer fight. In the nun’s office that spring day Sister Dulce and Ruthie had a general conversation about her medical condition. Then Sister asked Ruthie to step closer.

  She put her hands on Ruthie’s torso, on top of her clothes. The nun almost gasped. “Oh, child,” she said, “You are so sick.” Ruthie stood expressionless, blinking. Sister Dulce held Ruthie’s hands, and said she was going to talk to Papa. She added that she would walk this road by Ruthie’s side, if it took her through to healing, or if it ended in death.

  Tears spilled over Ruthie’s cheekbones as the little nun spoke, but she left the prayer center feeling more confident about the road ahead.

  This vulnerable Ruthie—the cancer sufferer who wept, who feared, who anguished—was not the Ruthie nearly everyone else saw. Only Mike and Abby saw her in these moments of doubt and pain. To her children, her parents, her friends, and her community, Ruthie was a tower of faith and a beacon of hope.

  After Ruthie’s treatment started Tim Lindsey moved into a medical support role in Ruthie’s life. He didn’t see her as often in his office, but he did see her around town. At birthday parties, ball games, parades, school events, and anything her girls were involved in, Ruthie was there with a smile on her face. The townspeople were amazed by the fight she had in her. “Her cancer is really bad, right, doc?” a patient asked Tim. “But she came to my kid’s birthday party anyway.”

  “I saw her at the football game the other night,” another one said. “It was raining and everything, but she didn’t miss it.”

  At one point in her struggle, Tim could see how much pain she was in, and confronted her with some difficult questions.

  “Have you thought about whether or not there’s a time when we need to call hospice, when you’re done with this treatment?” he asked. “You have to let me know, because I’ll support you a hundred percent. How are you dealing with this? Do you need anything for your emotions? How are you doing all this?”

  She had not thought about hospice care. She had not seriously considered that she might not survive.

  “Tim, if I think about truly how sick I am, it will overwhelm me,” she said. “I have to focus on what I have, what I’ve been given. Otherwise, I’m not going to be able to make it.”

  The way Ruthie was, if she believed she was fine, and acted like she was fine, then she would be fine.

  Tim’s wife, Laura, heard the same thing from Ruthie. In the summer of 2011 Laura was picking up her daughter at cheerleader camp when she saw Mam, who told her that Ruthie was at the hospital having X-rays. She had fallen the night before and hurt her ribs. Ruthie eventually showed up at the camp and told Laura nothing was broken, but she was in a lot of pain.

  After the program ended Laura’s friend Betsy approached them and asked Ruthie how she was doing.

  “I’m fine, I’m good,” Ruthie said. You could believe that, too, because she didn’t say these assuring things in a nervous, defensive voice, but rather in her customary calming cadence.

  Laura wasn’t fooled. She looked at Betsy and said jokingly, “Ruthie’s lying to you. She hurts a lot.”

  “No, I am okay,” Ruthie insisted. “This is the deal: if I tell myself I’m okay, I’m okay. But if I tell myself I’m not okay, I’ll crawl in a hole and I’ll never come out of it.”

  That same summer Ruthie and Abby went for a drive into Mississippi to shop for antiques. On the way home they stopped at a café for lunch. Abby had been grappling with anger at God for what had happened to Ruthie, and trying to understand Ruthie’s peacefulness in the face of her pain and suffering.

  “Ruthie, do you think about tomorrow?” Abby asked. “Do you think about the future? Do you p
lan?”

  “I don’t think past today,” Ruthie replied.

  “Do you make yourself not do that? Because if I were in your shoes, I would have to force myself to stop thinking about tomorrow. Don’t you?”

  “No, I just don’t.”

  As crazy as it sounded Abby respected Ruthie’s denial as a commonsense strategy to help her endure the seemingly unendurable. Ruthie had told Dr. Miletello to do whatever he thought best and placed her trust, and her life, in his hands, and in God’s. Besides Abby knew, if Ruthie did not, that her best friend faced very long odds with this cancer. If choosing not to look at the monster under the bed helped Ruthie sleep better on the nights she had left on this earth, well, who was Abby to question that?

  Though I didn’t dare say so, there were times when I wondered whether what looked like bravery was in fact a form of cowardice in the face of the awful truth about her condition. It didn’t make sense to me. Everybody could see how serene, how happy, and how joyful Ruthie was, despite suffering terribly. But did this count as courage if she achieved that state of equilibrium by refusing to know the truth?

  I was scared to ask her, afraid that I would plant doubt in her mind, doubt that would act as a gust of wind that would topple her from the high wire she was walking. And for what? Nothing I could say to Ruthie would prolong her life, or make her better able to enjoy whatever time she had left. Her doctors were throwing everything medical science had at her. All the extra information could only sap her will to resist. The truth—the whole truth, that is—would not set her free, but would make her captive to anxiety, and tempt her to despair. This was not a classroom exercise in faith versus doubt. This was not an argument at a college cafeteria table between philosophy students who had the leisure to speculate on ultimate questions. This was reality. This was a woman who was waging a desperate guerrilla war for her life. What good would it do her to hear me say that the forces of death arrayed against her were overwhelming?