Ruby Kleinrath

Welcomed Home

“Would you like something to eat?”

Mrs. Ruby walked to her dresser, opened a drawer and lifted the carefully folded delicates, to reveal a selection of halloween candy, two cookies and a yeast roll, wrapped in a paper napkin. This was her offering, all she had in the world. Her table, not good enough, yet the finest in all of Georgia.

I took a candy and a cookie and sat on her bed. The chocolate had turned white and the shortbread was stale. I ate them up and she smiled. She was watching me.

She lifted her index finger with a wink and said, “I’ve been saving those.”

Two years later, I was called into her hospital room one morning. 

“Would you try to make her eat something? She hasn’t had a bite in two days,” her son said. 

I sat beside her and we smiled. She knew my face. 

“Not hungry?” I said, pointing to the covered dish.

She shook her head and answered weakly. “They are putting medicine in my food. I don’t want medicine. A patient has rights,” she said, with her lovely thin finger in the air, though it took great effort.

I nodded my support and opened the cover off the plate. Her breakfast had grown cold. The grits were solidified and the scrambled eggs were too pale— not the kind of food to foster the will to live. I opened a little syrup container and jellied the biscuit and started eating. “Mhmm.”

Her eyebrows raised. “Is that real maple syrup?”

I looked down at the label. “No,” I said but with a deceptive nod. 

I offered her a bite from my fork, and she took it.

Back and forth, we ate the biscuit and syrup. It was her last meal on earth. I would have ground the wheat and cut in the cold butter for the biscuits. I would have opened the reserve muscadine jelly. I would have tapped the grandest maple tree myself, for Mrs. Ruby. That’s the kind of meal she deserved, but in a way this was fitting. Our small imperfect snack was a parable of what she was heading to and what she was leaving behind. She was on her way to Jesus. Perhaps the failures of that make-do meal only heightened her traveling joy. Perhaps the shared moment was really for my nourishment and not hers. She stopped to have one last table in this world with a young girl she had only known a few years. I was a companion in her pilgrimage for only a moment, but her memory will go on with me as long as I live, until my own last meal and breath.

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I was with Mrs. Ruby all day in the ER. Mrs. Georgia came. We hovered over her for a long time together, willing her eyes to open. It was like the day I searched for my favorite dog, and imagined over and over again his answering bark. You can picture it all, and how it should happen, you know. But nothing. Then just at the last, she really did open her eyes on us. 

“Ahhh!” she said in that Norwegian way, a delighted, eloquent sound. 

It was like how we will meet again one day.