Ruby Gillis's terminal illness

Ruby Gillis's terminal illness culminates in a death that is peaceful in manner but lasting in its effect on Anne Shirley. Ruby dies in her sleep, painlessly and calmly; the smile on her face makes death seem, in retrospect, less like the grisly phantom she feared and more like a kindly guide. The story gives little medical detail, concentrating instead on the contrast between Ruby's apprehension and the serenity of her final appearance.

Illness and Death

The last time Anne sees Ruby alive is their good night in the garden. Anne walks home slowly afterward, newly aware that Ruby's fear of facing death has unsettled her own assumptions about how to live. She resolves not to reach the end of one life only to meet the next with shrinking terror, and to begin the life of heaven on earth by pursuing what is highest rather than living only for life's smaller pleasures. The next night, while the A.V.I.S. holds a farewell party for Jane Andrews before her departure for the West, a summons comes to Ruby. By morning, word has passed from house to house in Avonlea: Ruby has died in her sleep.

Funeral and Remembrance

At the funeral, Anne has placed delicate flowers around Ruby, who lies dressed in white. Rachel Lynde calls her the handsomest corpse she has ever seen, and Ruby's appearance becomes a subject of remembrance in Avonlea for years. The narration contrasts this final image with Ruby's beauty in life, which it describes as earthly and lacking the refinement of spirit or intellect. Death seems to consecrate that beauty, revealing a delicacy and purity of outline that the narrator imagines life, love, sorrow, and the joys of mature womanhood might otherwise have brought forth. Through tears, Anne believes she sees the face God meant Ruby to have, and carries that image with her in memory.

Meaning for Anne Shirley

Ruby's death gives Anne's reflection in the garden an immediate and irreversible weight: the farewell was their last, and Anne never sees her old playfellow alive again. Ruby had feared the crossing into death as something wholly unfamiliar; the peacefulness of her death offers a final image at odds with that fear, though the story does not say that Ruby herself came to share Anne's changed understanding. For Anne, the encounter makes mortality a summons to examine how life is lived. The funeral's transformation of Ruby's remembered face extends that change from private thought into communal memory: Avonlea continues to recall her not only as the beautiful young woman she had been, but through the serenity and tenderness of her final appearance.