Today is Julie’s and my wedding anniversary, an anniversary we share with my sister Ruthie and her husband Mike. Today is the first of those anniversaries Mike is spending without Ruthie, who died in September. If you’re the sort who prays, please remember Mike Leming in your prayers.

In the current issue of TAC, I have an essay discussing the way Ruthie faced death — a very different way of doing so than I would have chosen. From the beginning of her cancer treatment, she told her doctors not to give her odds or any other details beyond what she absolutely needed to know. To have any more information than that would risk distracting her from her mission: beat cancer. For Ruthie, to be compelled to contemplate all the possibilities before her, philosophically or otherwise, was a luxury she didn’t think she could afford. I never understood that — to me, information is strength — and I was shocked to find out just after she died that she hadn’t had a long, deep discussion with Mike about what would need to happen if she didn’t make it.

I wondered then: was Ruthie’s incredible courage in dealing with cancer actually a form of denial? Maybe it was. Or maybe, as in so many things between us, we were just very different people who reacted to life’s challenges in very different ways. What is courage, anyway? From the essay:

A firefighter preparing to run into a burning skyscraper doesn’t stop to philosophize about his possible death. He has a mission, prays for the courage to do his duty, and engages. So it was with Ruthie, who saw her mission not only to survive cancer but to overcome the darkness cancer brought with it, so as to be a light to her children and to others. Ruthie called out to God for help in the oppressive darkness of the valley of the shadow of death, and He sent help. Not, in the end, the help she wanted, but the help she needed to do what she had to do.

Perhaps the greatest courage she demonstrated was the courage to believe, simply and surely, that all was well, and all would be well, for both the Bible she read faithfully and believed without protest and the silent ministrations of what she believed was a messenger from God told her so. That belief, held firmly with an iron-fisted internal resolve, helped her not only to endure 19 months of intense suffering with fierce grace that matured into spiritual grandeur, but to triumph over the grim odds predicting an early demise. Ruthie’s way was not my way, and never was, but the way she faced death taught me respect for the role of the disciplined will in matters of religious faith and moral courage.

A blessed anniversary to my brother in law Mike, who was married to a brave and beautiful woman.