A Conversation with Author Rod Dreher
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Rod and Ruthie
After decades as a professional journalist, was it difficult to
write such a personal story? Were there any unexpected challenges
that came up during the writing process?
The chief difficulty came for me in having to recognize that the
people I was writing about weren't just subjects, but people I
loved and cared about, and among whom I lived. I constantly
thought about balancing respect for them and their feelings with
respect for the truth. Everybody loves the fun stories about
Ruthie, but if I had left it at that, it wouldn't have been the
whole story of Ruthie. What I didn't expect were the
philosophical challenges that came up as I worked on the book. I
was most struck by the nature of Ruthie's courage in facing her
cancer. I learned as I reported the book that Ruthie never talked
with her husband or her children about the possibility of her
death--this, even though she lived for 19 months with terminal
cancer. She was both accepting of death, and terrified of it. She
lived with a lot of denial. In learning more about her, I came to
understand that the line between heroic courage and stark terror
is far more ambiguous than I thought.
Maybe the main difference between us was that while my nature
was to approach the world from a critical stance, she accepted
life as it was. She almost always met it with humility, fidelity,
and above all, love. It is perhaps the most beautiful paradox of
Ruthie Leming’s life that in showing us how to die, she showed us
how to live.
To write The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, you interviewed many
people from your hometown and your immediate family. What was
that process like so shortly after Ruthie’s passing?
I felt as if I were trying to cross a minefield. She had been
gone only three months when I started these interviews. The
hardest interviews, of course, were with my family. During one
interview, my her stood behind the couch in his living room
talking about Ruthie, and in mid-sentence broke down into sobs,
and had to grab the furniture to steady himself. It was
heartbreaking to watch the man who had always been the rock of
our family reduced to that, and awful too to know that I had
forced him into it with my questioning. But I also knew that I
couldn't flinch, and neither could he. This story had to be told.
Without a doubt the most difficult interview was with Ruthie’s
husband Mike, a big, quiet man who doesn't talk much, and never
about his feelings. He collapsed emotionally during the
interview, but pushed himself on, saying what needed saying. I've
done lots of interviews in my career, including talking to 9/11
survivors. But nothing as searing as that one.
Community is a strong theme in the book. How did your idea of
community evolve over the course of Ruthie's illness and how did
it led to your decision to leave the "big city" for a tiny
country town?
Everybody wants to belong. I grew up in a close-knit place where
I belonged, until I got to high school. Suddenly I didn't. I was
bullied. This happened at the same time that my her had no
idea what to do with me. Paw was, and is, a good and loving man,
but as I began to turn out different from what he
expected--bookish, nerdy, and intellectual, instead of outdoorsy
and athletic--the distance between us grew wide. Thank God for
Mam, who battled with him on my behalf, so I could leave home and
spend my junior and senior years in a public boarding school for
gifted kids. I put my hometown behind me, and never looked back.
And then Ruthie got , and I saw the community in a new way.
I also began to see myself in a new way. Ruthie was a y
woman in the prime of her life, and had never smoked--yet she
came down with terminal lung cancer. If that could happen to a
woman like her, anything was possible. What would I do if it
happened to me, or to my wife? We had friends in every place we'd
lived, but we hadn't lived in any one place long enough to put
down the roots that Ruthie had, not only because she spent her
life here, but because she cultivated roots laid down by previous
generations of our family. I came to understand that my family
needed what Ruthie had, the kind of things that money can't buy.
I could have at least some of it, I realized--but only if I
sacrificed my own individual desire to follow my career wherever
it took me.
The lesson is not that everybody should move to a small town, or
should return to their hometown. The lesson is that you need your
community more than you think, and that you should practice what
the Benedictine monks call "stability." That is, do your best to
stay in one place, put down roots, and resist the currents of our
culture.
You say that returning to St. Francisville was an unexpected
decision, but felt like what you had to do. What has it been like
to come back to the town you grew up in and then left as a young
man?
People have been great, really great. I find that some of the
ordinary things that I rejected when I was young--the quiet,
mostly--are things that I crave now, things that feed my soul. I
love the fact that my kids can see their grandparents, and are
getting to know a range of cousins they never really knew they
had, because we were never able to visit long enough in the past
for them to spend time with these people. The familiar used to
feel oppressive; now it feels comforting.
Now you're back in St. Francisville. Do you think you will stay
or will your love of city life kick back in?
Oh no, we'll stay. We want to stay. We are home.