Ruby Gillis confides her fear of death to Anne

Ruby Gillis confides her fear of death to Anne Shirley during a moonlit visit that becomes both a final act of trust and a turning point in Anne’s thinking about life and the hereafter. Ruby gives voice to the knowledge she has avoided all summer: she is dying, does not want to leave the world she knows, and is afraid of what comes next. Anne cannot remove that fear with certainty or easy reassurance, but her quiet presence allows Ruby to speak openly; the conversation also impels Anne to seek a life prepared for more than its passing pleasures.

Background and Setting

Anne has spent many evenings with Ruby in the Gillis garden through a summer of worsening illness. She has even given up a moonlight drive to White Sands to visit, though the visits leave her tired and sometimes make her wonder whether she can continue. Ruby, who had once filled their conversations with beaux and their rivalries, is growing paler and weaker. Her father has withdrawn her from teaching at White Sands, and the fancy work she loves increasingly falls from hands too weary to continue. Even so, she has remained cheerful and talkative, rarely acknowledging what her declining strength means.

Anne finds that cheerfulness painful rather than reassuring. She sees Ruby’s lively talk as a mask over the death that is already approaching, and feels she cannot give the help Ruby seems to need. Rachel Lynde grumbles about the frequency of Anne’s visits and fears Anne will catch consumption; Marilla Cuthbert, too, notices that Anne comes home exhausted. Anne explains that the fatigue comes from feeling she is watching Ruby struggle against an invisible enemy with almost no strength to resist it. On this evening, however, Ruby is unusually quiet. She lies in a hammock with her work untouched, a white shawl around her thin shoulders, and her long braids loose because pins make her head ache.

The scene’s setting brings the subject Ruby has kept at bay directly before her. Moonlight falls on the pond and on the churchyard beside the Gillis homestead, making the white gravestones stand out against the dark trees. Looking at the graveyard, Ruby shudders and says she will soon lie there, while Anne, Diana Barry, and the others continue living. The landscape is not merely a picturesque backdrop: it gives Ruby’s feared future a visible form, and her sudden declaration breaks through the gaiety she has maintained throughout the summer.

The Confession

Ruby asks Anne whether she knows that the prediction is true. Anne answers quietly that she does. Ruby then admits that she has known all summer, although she had refused to accept it, and tells Anne plainly that she does not want to die and is afraid. Her confidence is striking because it reverses the usual shape of their visits: the girl who has kept up bright conversation about courtship now speaks directly about the subject she had been trying not to name.

Ruby distinguishes fear of death from doubt about religious salvation. She believes she will go to heaven and points to her church membership, yet that assurance does not make the prospect familiar or comforting. What frightens her is that heaven cannot be the life she has been used to. She wants to remain here, is still young, and feels she has not had the life she expected. The confession exposes the distance between religious belief as an abstract promise and the emotional attachment to the particular, earthly existence she must leave.

Anne tries to answer without claiming knowledge she does not possess. Her ideas about heaven have been changing beyond her earlier, more childish conceptions, and she hesitates because speaking of such deep matters is difficult for her. She suggests that the next life may not be wholly unlike life on earth: people may continue to be themselves, while hindrances and perplexities fall away and goodness becomes easier to follow. Her words are offered as belief and hope, not proof. Ruby recognizes that Anne cannot be certain, and says that even if this picture is true, it cannot make the future simply the same as the present. Anne also understands the force of that objection: Ruby is leaving everything she cares for, having invested her hopes in earthly things rather than in what might bridge the passage between the two lives.

Love, Loss, and Trust

Ruby’s fear has a particular human shape as well as a religious one. She longs to live as other girls do, marry, and have little children, whom she has always loved. She also reveals that Herb loves her and that she loves him; unlike the other young men she had discussed, he matters to her, and she believes she would have been happy as his wife if she could live. She says she could tell this only to Anne, whose understanding makes the admission possible. The confession thus discloses not just the future Ruby fears but the ordinary future she had privately imagined and now knows she will not have.

Ruby breaks down sobbing, and Anne presses her hand, offering sympathy rather than an argument. The narration presents this wordless response as potentially more helpful than imperfect consolation. After Ruby grows calmer, she explains that she has wanted to tell Anne all summer but feared that saying she was going to die would make death feel certain. In the daytime, cheerful company helped keep the thought away; at night, when she could not sleep, she felt unable to escape it. Her account shows how silence has intensified her fear: the truth has been present throughout the summer, but she has borne it alone until this conversation.

The openness extends beyond Ruby’s illness. She tells Anne that she has recently made peace with Em White, a former close school friend with whom she quarrelled at a school concert. Each had believed the other would refuse to make the first approach, and neither had spoken for years. Faced with death, Ruby now sees that estrangement as foolish. Anne responds that misunderstanding causes much of life’s trouble. The reconciliation gives the scene a second disclosure: Ruby’s awareness of her limited time has brought an old grievance to an end, just as her trust in Anne allows another long-withheld truth to be spoken.

Aftermath and Significance

Anne promises to return soon and urges Ruby to be brave and believe that all will be well. Ruby says she will try to think over Anne’s words, asks for further visits, and tells her that she has already helped. The exchange does not erase Ruby’s knowledge of death or promise that she will recover; its immediate consequence is that she no longer has to face her fear entirely in silence. The intimacy is mutual in a different way: Ruby entrusts Anne with the love and dread she has concealed, while Anne gives her attention without pretending to certainty.

Walking home slowly in the moonlight, Anne feels that the evening has changed something in her. Life may continue outwardly as before, but its depths have been stirred. She resolves that her own life must not leave her, at its end, facing the next as something wholly alien because her habitual thoughts and aspirations have prepared her for nothing else. The conversation leads her to distinguish the small pleasures of life, valuable in their place, from the higher things that should guide it. The conviction she carries home is that the life of heaven must begin on earth: the scene’s effect is not only consolation for Ruby but a redirection of Anne’s moral and spiritual purpose.

The visit proves to be their last. Ruby dies in her sleep the following night, calmly and without pain. The next morning, news travels through Avonlea. At Ruby’s funeral, Anne has placed delicate flowers around her, and Rachel Lynde remembers Ruby as exceptionally beautiful in death. Anne, looking through tears at her old playfellow, sees in Ruby’s face a purity she feels life might have brought out through love, sorrow, and womanhood. The final contrast does not undo Ruby’s loss: it places her earlier fear beside the peaceful death she did not live to witness for herself. Her confession remains the scene in which she names that fear, shares the life she wanted, and receives the comfort of being understood before the summons comes.