Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D. Her Legacy

Early on in Someone To Tell It To’s life, we read a book that has been pivotal to the vision that was foundational for our work:

Kitchen Table Wisdom, by Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D.

Dr. Remen was a pediatrician in the United States, the founder of the Remen Institute for the Study of Health & Illness, an author, and a teacher of integrative medicine. She has taught at the Boonshoft School of Medicine at Ohio’s Wright State University and at University of California San Francisco School of Medicine. Kitchen Table Wisdom was a bestselling book, which we loved. She wrote and published other books that were equally loved by readers, as well. 

She passed from this life on the morning of August 8 this year, at age 88, surrounded by her family. 

We celebrate her life and incredible wisdom. We mourn her passing. We are grateful for the legacy that her experience, words, and insights on living a meaningful and good life, having a peaceful death, embracing empathy, finding healing, and holding on to hope that shine as a light into the darkness of a broken world. 

Kitchen Table Wisdom is a book of stories. Inspiring stories of people’s strength, perseverance, and belief that no matter what life brought to them, there was always a reason for hope to be found and joy to be expressed. Many of the stories were those of patients that Dr. Remen treated during her career. Quite a few were parts of her own story, of a life rising against the odds - being one of only a few females studying to be doctors and also overcoming chronic disease and dozens of hospital stays and surgeries.

Here are a few of the beautiful quotes that are attributed to Dr. Remen, that speak to so much of the foundational work and values that she held and that so closely align with Someone To Tell It To’s values, especially as it relates to listening and holding compassionately others’ stories:

When you listen generously to people they can hear the truth in themselves, often for the first time.

I suspect that the most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention. 

A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.

It is often through the quality of our listening and not the wisdom of our words that we are able to effect the most profound changes in the people around us.

Everybody is a story. When I was a child, people sat around kitchen tables and told their stories. We don't do that so much anymore. Sitting around the table telling stories is not just a way of passing time. It is the way the wisdom gets passed along. The stuff that helps us to live a life worth remembering. Despite the awesome powers of technology many of us still do not live very well. We may need to listen to each other's stories once again.

Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn't you – all of the expectations, all of the beliefs – and becoming who you are. 

While an impulse toward wholeness is natural and exists in everyone, each of us heals in our own way. Some people heal because they have work to do. Others heal because they have been released from their work and the pressures and expectations that others place on them. Some people need music, others need silence, some need people around them, others heal alone. Many different things can activate and strengthen the life force in us. For each of us there are conditions of healing that are as unique as a fingerprint.

Here are two touching podcasts which allow us to hear Dr. Remen’s voice and to hear how her life of service impacted so many others:

“Remembering Dr. Rachel Remen: What is the Secret to True Healing?”, on Staying Human with Dr. Vivek Murthy (the 19th and 21st Surgeon General of the United States).

“Rachel Naomi Remen: How We Live with Loss”, on On Being with Krista Tippett (U. S. author, podcaster, and broadcaster)

What a life so well-lived. What a voice that spoke of kindness, joy, and hope. What a legacy she left, that shines a warming, calming light into the darkness among us. 

We’ll end our tribute to Dr. Remen with her own words:

"Most of us lead far more meaningful lives than we know. Often finding meaning is not about doing things differently; it is about seeing familiar things in new ways. When we find new eyes, the unsuspected blessing in work we have done for many years may take us completely by surprise. We can see life in many ways: with the eye, with the mind, with the intuition. But perhaps it is only by those who speak the language of meaning, who have remembered how to see with the heart, that life is ever deeply known or served."