The Little Way of Ruthie Leming

I just finished The Little Way of Ruthie Leming. Rod Dreher, a Philadelphia journalist, tells how he came back to his hometown of St. Francisville, Louisiana (pop. 1,700) in the wake of his younger sister Ruthie's death. When she was diagnosed at age 40 with a virulent form of cancer in 2010, Dreher was moved by the way the community he had left behind rallied around his dying sister, a schoolteacher. 

Here's one of the book's final passages:

Nobody thinks about limits, and how much we need each other. But if you live long enough, you see suffering. It comes close to you. It shatters the illusion, so dear to us, of self-sufficiency, of autonomy, of control. Look, a wife and mother, a good woman in the primer of her life, dying from cancer. It doesn't just happen to other people. It happens to your family. What do you do then?

The insurance company, if you're lucky enough to have insurance, pays your doctors and pharmacists, but it will not cook for you when you are too sick to cook for yourself and your kids. Nor will it clean your house, pick your kids up from school, or take them shopping when you are too weak to get out of bed. A bureaucrat from the state or the insurance company won't come sit with you, and pray with you, and tell you she loves you. It won't be the government or your insurer who allows you to die in peace, if it comes to that, because it can assure you that your spouse and children will not be left behind to face the world alone.

Only our family and your community can do that.