Ruby This essay earned a bronze medal in the 2006 National Hospice Writing Contest. Copyright 2006 by Jane Mary Curran. All rights reserved. A hot, bright July morning. The mist had burned off and the temperature was rising along with the humidity. I went to Ruby’s house for an early visit. The earlier the better since Ruby’s house was a tiny trailer with some add-on rooms, no ventilation, and not a breath of air conditioning. She met me at the front door. “It’s in a bucket on the back porch. I fished it out of the commode.” “Was it dead?” I asked. “No! It’s out on the back porch—in a bucket.” “It’s what? A possum?” “Yeah. Just a little one. I got him on the toilet brush. He fell off, but I kinda pushed him between the brush and the lid like, and put him in a bucket to dry out. Come on and look at him.” So to the back porch we went and there in a scrub bucket was a very small creature with a very long tail, looking exactly like a drowned rat until it looked up at me with that unmistakable face of night’s best scavenger, the opossum. Its hair stood up in wet tufty spikes and its eyes blinked in the unaccustomed sunlight. I suggested it might need a drink of water. “I thought I’d let it dry out some first.” And there was no arguing with that. The little creature was soaked as well as stunned from its earlier swim in the commode. A day in the life of Ruby. I met Ruby after her admission to the home care hospice program. She was in her daughter’s home where she was lodged in the gun room. She lay on a single bed surrounded by the glazed eyes of mounted deer heads and racks of rifles. In the midst of this arsenal and mementos of the dead, Ruby was a blast of life force with a will of pure steel. She had several goals. Primary was to “get back home and stop bothering my family”. From what I saw on that first visit, I privately wondered whether she could or would ever live on her own again. At that moment Ruby couldn’t walk. But she explained to me how much better she’d be at home because “the walls are close together and I can hold on to both sides and keep my balance. It’s good to have a little house.” That was the beginning of Ruby’s hospice journey. From her daughter’s home she came to our in-patient facility. After a long sojourn there, days and weeks of physical therapy coupled with grit like I’d rarely seen before, Ruby went home to her cobbled little house where she could steady herself by touching two walls at once. “There’s no place like home,” she said over and over. “There’s no place like home.” I called her Dorothy and she laughed that gurgly chuckle and said, “I don’t care what you call me. There’s no place like home and that’s that.” Ruby loved life in all its forms. Children, grandchildren, animals, and her wonderful birds. She had three cages and six or seven canaries, parakeets, and one without a pedigree who made up for any lack by an attitude worthy of avoidance. But Ruby loved them all, talked to them, knew their habits and needs, and, somehow with the mind-boggling agility of the truly determined, kept their cages clean with food and water every day. Ruby loved life. She didn’t let that baby possum drown. And she intended to keep her whole world afloat for as long as she drew breath. Her favorite at home activity was working jigsaw puzzles, huge, many-pieced puzzles. Some she mounted on plywood and gave away. Some she just tore down again and gave away. We discussed the fine points of puzzle working. And compared the process to life. “You got to get the frame done first. Then you fill in as you go.” Sounded like a recipe for life to me. Ruby agreed. Her framework was “I’ve had a hard life, but I’m gonna make it.” Her story was woven with abuse, physical violence, and a rock-hard desire to survive, to live, no matter what. As a working mom, she filled in the framework with loving her children and working, working, working. As a hospice patient in her own home, she filled in the framework by baking cakes for the Meals on Wheels folks who brought her lunch. She gave her paint-by-numbers pictures to her hospice workers. And she made homemade jelly and gave jars to a wide network of friends and family as they brought bouquets of flowers to “poor Ruby”. The puzzles created order, provided purpose and meaning, structure to her life. First the framework. Then you fill it in. That winter my cat sickened and died. I told Ruby because she asked about him often. Then she talked about having to give away her little dog, Taco, when she had to leave her home and go live in the gun room. We were sad together. About four months later she asked me, “Did you get another cat?” “No,” I said. “I’ll go to the pound when I get back from vacation in a few weeks.” “Well, I dreamed you got another cat.” “What color was it?” “Black and white. About six months old. I really did. I dreamed you got another cat.” “Was it male or female?” “I don’t think I knew in the dream. But I know it was black and white.” Three weeks later I met Ruby’s dream at the pound. Just like she said. She was very pleased. So was I. So was the cat. Ruby never denied that “my days are numbered”. But the emphasis was always on living. To support her daughter. To help raise her grandsons. To rescue drowning possums from the toilet. To give whatever she had and whatever was needed. She was no saint and would have questioned the sanity of anyone who might call her that. She had fought—with words and fists—for her children and for herself. She was rough and had made her way by working “like a man, like a horse” as she put it often. “I guess I just used myself up. It’s been hard, but it’s been good, too.” When she couldn’t stay in her “no place like home” due to disease process, she came back to the in-patient facility and there she shut down. Gone were the jokes. Gone were the affirmations. Gone were the fill-in pieces of the puzzle. What remained was a valiant warrior who was losing the battle even as she was winning the war. But for a few days the victory seemed to feel like defeat. In the end was peace, but it was slow in coming. Fighting with every ounce of life force is a hard habit to surrender. In remembering Ruby words come. Words like survivor and teacher. For me she was a vessel of life and for life wherever she went and whatever she did. “Those possums live under the house. Come up through the plumbing. I fish ‘em out of the toilet. They just go back under the house and do it all again. But you got to get ‘em. You can’t just let ‘em die. That one’s in a bucket on the back porch. Come on. I’ll show you.” When we went back to the porch for the second time, the baby possum was no longer in the bucket. It was gone. Dried out in the summer sun.  Alive and free. In gratitude.