Remembering Rachel Naomi Remen, MD

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!

Some thoughts on sex trafficking

We are spiritual beings having a human experience. When someone ignores this, thinking you are just a body, detachable from spirit like a shadow, you demean the core sacred center of the life of this person, a multifaceted human being. Making them into a thing. Disposable, like kleenex. To take lovemaking and turn it into a crass use of someone’s body, often not even to give pleasure, and certainly not intending that this person receive tenderness, compassion, or love, but simply to exercise power over them, ensnared like a trapped animal, is extremely destructive. Often it is exacerbated by even more violence and cruelty. For many of us, it would instinctively be better to be murdered than raped. Rape incurs deep shame, feeling abased. It never goes away. The scars last for decades, even in healthy relationships; sexual abuse suddenly may rear its ugly roots of torment and emotional scarring. The body remembers, and shrivels down into fear and wanting to find safety, even after successful therapy. As a gynecologist, I have known this, I have seen it in women even into their 70s and 80s.

To sell a person into slavery is a terrible thing. To sell them to do manual labor, dangerous and unrecompensed work, is hard enough; but to make their body feel so abused and their personhood so corrupted, is soul-destroying.

The Epstein sex-trafficking ring lasted for 30 years. There were at least a thousand identified victims. Many have told their stories in court, and won their cases. The majority of women who were used by this ring came from Eastern European countries. That is probably how the tracks got covered for so long. The monetary value of that ring was 1.5 BILLION dollars. In early reports, it was said that 1.1 billion came from Trump. I don’t have the attribution to that, but maybe this week, when Congressman Ro Khanna allows the victims to tell their stories to Congress and the public, we will get more details about the way the money was hidden. But this is not just about money. It is about a long-standing practice of abuse of children and women, and we need to have good men and women rise up and share OUTRAGE, and promise to tighten the laws, to not let it happen again. And to bring the perpetrators to justice. Certainly not to allow access to children; girls and young women, but also young men. Jesus had heavy words to say about those who hurt children (Matthew 18:6). For those who want our country’s ethics to be based in Christian thinking, it is worth pondering that.

Martina Nicholson, MD

retired gynecologist

My theatre experience

In high school, at Marymount in Santa Barbara, I was in a small class of young women. Our teacher-nuns decided to put on the play “The Lark” by Jean Anouilh. I was given the role of Warwick, who was the British supervisor of the trial of Joan of Arc, in the mid 1400s, in France.

Just recently, I found a cache of letters my sisters and I had sent to our parents, who were on a trip in Europe. I mentioned my theatre practice, and that the sister in charge of us was asking me to be more masculine and to show more authority. I loved that play, and the words I got to say contained the title. “The girl was a lark over the skies of France.” I grappled with being from an all-girl family (admittedly the bossy older sister) playing the role of Warwick, with masculine energy and authority.

Many years later, (about 20 years ago, I think), someone brought forth a copy of the silent film of the Passion of Joan of Arc, made by the Danish filmmaker Carl Dreyer, in 1928. It was so intensely beautiful, and hard to watch, but then a musician at the Cabrillo music festival set the movie to music. Our local choral people got to sing it, and I was present at the local premier. The composer, Richard Einhorn, did a marvelous job. It is profoundly moving, to hear fabulous and complex choral music paired with a classical silent film based on the innocent suffering of a saint. It deepened my awe for Joan of Arc, for what she did for France.

After “The Lark”, to which we won a small bonfire of acclaim, as a senior in High School, I was in a single act play for one actress, called. “Sorry, Wrong Number” by Lucille Fletcher. This play starts with a woman in her bed at night answering the phone and overhearing a plan to murder someone. Slowly and fiercely the tension is turned up, as she realizes she is the target of the plan. I got much critical acclaim in our little community for this role, also, though it was somewhat emotionally draining, and very intense.

So when I got to college, I thought it would be fun to join the theatre for a play, and the play that I auditioned for as a freshman, in 1968-9 was “Marat-Sade”. This is the short name for the whole name of the play, which is “The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat, as performed by the inmates of the asylum of Charenton, under the direction of the Marquis de Sade.” by Peter Weiss. Our theatre director had really wanted to work with this play, and none of us had any idea of what it was about. When we got to the rehearsal room, he told us that it was a play about the French Revolution, as acted by inmates of an insane asylum to which the Marquis de Sade had been committed. The themes of the play were grappling with the revolution, and the murder of Marat, who had been the head of the reign of terror, as he tried to eliminate all the aristocrats who they thought had been the root cause of the revolution. The sung refrain in the play is “Marat, we’re poor, and the poor stay poor. Marat don’t make us wait any more. We want our rights, and we don’t care how: we want our revolution NOW.” SO our theatre director’s way of choosing the “chorus” for the play was to ask us to practice being theatrically insane, such that we could each be seen in our own little boxes, at the back of the stage, (very like what a zoom screen looks like now), with about 20 people in little boxes like cages, about 4’ by 4’, sitting cross-legged, or kneeling, or dangling their legs over the edge, where each one is in his or her own world of insanity. All of the actors in the play, when we performed it, wore white padded long tunics for clothing and white padded long, over-the knee boots, and their faces were a mask of white make-up.

In the room where we were practicing acting insane, some were howling, some were groaning, and many were writhing. Some got down into a fetal position and curled up in a posture of acute paranoia and almost catatonia. A few were lashing out. One guy was dramatically lascivious toward the women. One woman sat in the corner drooling, with her arms going up and down like she was trying to draw out spirits from a dream-hole we couldn’t see, in a sort of slow balletic rhythm.

My response to this was to walk around wringing my hands, saying to myself and to anyone listening “Oh, my God, what can I do to help here?” It was beyond endurance. I think we stopped this acting after about 2 hours. I think the director was trying to see if we could keep it up for the actual length of the play.

I was accepted into the cast. The director continued to work with each of us, to polish our spontaneous acting. My role was to be a Sister of Mercy, with the wide white winged-headdress of the nuns, a grey loose robe, and a long big wooden rosary at the waist. My hands were to be continually wringing, in between tasks, or tolling the rosary beads; and every once in a while I was to say, somewhat Sotto Voce, “Lord, forgive us for we know not what we do.” This was not hard to say, in the context of the play. My main task was to try to keep the lascivious hands of the lecher off of Charlotte Corday. Also, I was on the side of the stage folding laundry, maintaining a small rhythm of sanity in the madhouse. The play began with a woman screaming a long blood-curdling scream in one corner, while I folded the laundry and acted like this was normal. It was electrifying, and gut-punching. Occasionally someone in the patients group would climb down from their box, and I was to carefully and tenderly guide them back. Meanwhile Marat was in his bath in the center of the stage, and occasionally he would get out to go to his desk, or have a board brought to set across the bathtub, to give him a surface for writing another edict or order for execution. The bathwater was imaginary. We even had real wooden tumbrils for the king and queen, rolling across the stage to their executions; manned by the patients like big wheelbarrows.

We got rave reviews across the Bay area. No one could believe the college players could do such a rivetingly intense job, and the theatre was packed for all the performances.

Our school work was like eating oatmeal after doing this play day after day, night after night. I was emotionally overwrought by it, and when it was over, I decided I could not stay in theatre, and successfully do my college work.

So that was the end of my theatre career. It also occurs to me now that I am in my 70s, that the lines I said in the play have still been very easy for me to say often, and my hands often reach for a rosary. My faith has been tested but has held through all these decades. I tried to take care of the people who are suffering as well as I could; and I am very afraid of both madness, and revolution. There is also a weird resonance with the play about Joan of Arc; and the question of saintliness, martyrdom, and a calling that to many seemed not only extraordinary but insane. Archetypes who are both realistic and mystical still hold my attention. Intense and contradictory emotions and ideas which don’t fit easily into neat categories seem most real to me.