This past weekend, my mentor and friend, who was a giant in the field of medicine, in finding meaning and understanding of the complexities of true service, and in increasing compassionate care, passed away. Dr. Rachel Remen MD was the author of two best-sellers; books which are read all over the world now, which are about healing and wholeness: Kitchen Table Wisdom, and My Grandfather’s Blessings. Her undergraduate degree was in philosophy, and her grandfather was an Orthodox rabbi. She practiced pediatrics, and later, care for the physicians who were burning out under the stresses of conventional medicine. She founded a group of doctors called “the Institute for the Study of Health and Illness: it became the Remen ISHI, ( RISHI)”, when she retired. Her work continued at Wright State School of Medicine, as well as in Medical Schools across the country and even abroad. The program for physicians-in-training was called The Healer’s Art. I loved being part of the group of teachers for this course at the California North State School of Medicine in Oak Grove, outside Sacramento. 

Rachel was like a redwood tree; strong and wise, resilient and creative, and she raised up a whole forest of saplings surrounding her and her work, doctors who understood and cared deeply about the healing work we were doing. It was one of the greatest privileges of my life, to be her friend, and part of the circle of doctors in ISHI. In many ways, her modeling helped me resist the burn-out many of my colleagues experienced. I will miss her forever, but I am glad that there are videos, recordings and wonderful memories, as well as the other friends who knew and loved her. Today one of my friends sent me a podcast from On Being, with Krista Tippett, in which Rachel reflects on “how we live with loss”. I never tire of hearing her speak with that soft voice, and that incisive, amazing mind. 

And this is the link to Vivek Murthy visiting with Rachel, at Commonweal. https://youtu.be/Yql6mpvEaB0?si=JM_3jllCRpiOqBTT

YOUTUBE.COM

Can We All Become Healers? / Rachel Naomi Remen and U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy

I wanted to protect her from what she did not want from us, which was that adulation which came so naturally to her “fans”. She wanted to have simple friendships, and for us not to hang on her every word. She was realistic about the difficulties of trying to get the Healer’s Art into the medical curriculum, and she enjoyed the admiration, but to her friends she also just needed time to be quiet and reflective. The interview with Vivek Murthy is very good at showing her real balance and humility.

She really believed in the Kitchen Table as the best place for conversations. She believed in sharing from the heart and with an open mind. That is why it is in the title of her first book, which is one parable after another, about healing– from the doctor side, and from the patient side, because she knew both very deeply. One funny story I have is about her cats. I got her a birthday bouquet of silk flowers from the dollar store, a few years ago. It was inexpensive, colorful and a bit fun– pink polka dots on a white jug. She liked to be frugal when she shopped, although she had many beautiful things and lovely jewelry. SO I knew she would be amused, when most of her friends gave her expensive presents. ( Her birthday was around Valentine’s Day. ). She had two big cats, Main coon cats, and Max was ginger-colored. He was a mystical cat. Her whole house was built as a place where the cats could be entertained. Max loved those silk flowers! He would jump up on the counter in the kitchen in the morning, and sniff the flowers, as if they were real. He would seem to enjoy some hidden magical perfume. He would be in meditative awareness, sitting there, enjoying those silk flowers. We would laugh, to see him! It never ceased to please her, that my silly and inexpensive gift was something Max loved!

“BE happy anyway” is a great motto. It is resilience incarnate. Do not let anyone take away your ability to love and grow, and in general, the feeling of being happy will be like a bluebird on your shoulder. Rachel was radical, surgical, in her ability to strip away sentimentalism. When she talked about the rage she had as a young medical student with Crohn’s disease, she always said the rage was how the life force refused to let her give up. She spoke about colleagues who diminished her into a victim, thinking she couldn’t possibly be a contributing doctor, much less the head of a Department at Stanford, with the disease she lived with. She was fierce. She also had a courageous role model in her mother, who was a social worker in the slums of NY. And her grandfather made her know that there is a great BEING holding her in life, not a wimpy wisp of a spirit. Even as a small child, she got that gut-deep sense of the immensity of that power. Her grandfather stood outside the nursery, when she was a preemie in an incubator, and prayed for her, and knew that strength, and believed in that power for her, too. We don’t often feel that kind of awe, but her grandfather gave her that “ground of being”.

She helped me so much, not to feel like an alien in the work we were doing.

I really loved and admired her so deeply, and felt helped to become stronger, through the 30 years of our friendship and being in ISHI. It is fascinating to me that today is the feast of St. Clare. It is a synchronicity of overlapping women mystics teaching me/us. So simple, yet so rare, so focused, like a shaft of light. Clare said to hold up before us the mirror of Christ, to be able to understand the immense gifts of the soul. Rachel also was holding that mirror, of the presence of the divine, in the way it heals and strengthens the soul. She never used off-putting language, and she often referred to it as what makes us human. But it was always soul work. And invariably, one felt better after spending time with her.

We can’t even imagine the blocks she surmounted. I once asked her about her training as a concert pianist at Juilliard, and said I have never heard her play, and she did not have a piano in her house. She obviously had such a musical mind! She told me that they started judging more and more and more critically, every note she played, until she didn’t love the music anymore. And that she quit. She said “Martina, don’t be sad about this. If it hadn’t happened to me in musical training, I wouldn’t have recognized it when it started happening in medical training.” The insight had to come from lived experience of the subtle and careful bullying and perfectionism. The sad thing is that she was a student of Suzuki as a child, and wanted to play the violin, but the “experts” told her women weren’t great violinists, she should study piano. Even then, imagine!