Rachel Naomi Remen, a physician who taught that healing is not the same as curing, died Saturday at 8:24 a.m., surrounded by people who loved her. [1] She was 88. The family notice on Legacy recorded the hour. Health desks had not yet filed a Saturday wire. The institutional remembrances will come later. This is the morning she died.
At 15 she was diagnosed with severe Crohn's disease and given ten years. [1] She lived seven more decades and underwent more than a dozen major surgeries. [1] Illness was not a chapter she closed. It was the room she practiced in. Patients who have been told a number remember the person who treated the number as incomplete.
She was a clinical professor of family and community medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. [1] She founded the Remen Institute for the Study of Health and Illness and created The Healer's Art, a course that has reached tens of thousands of medical students and asked them why they wanted the work in the first place. [1] She co-founded the Commonweal Cancer Help Program with Michael Lerner and served as its medical director. [1] Bill Moyers put that program on television in Healing and the Mind. A PBS hour is how a general audience first heard a doctor talk about meaning as if it were a vital sign.
She wrote Kitchen Table Wisdom and My Grandfather's Blessings, bestsellers published in more than twenty languages, stories gathered from a lifetime of practice. [1] Later she wrote a children's book, The Birthday of the World, a kabbalistic tale about light hidden in everyone. [1] The titles are domestic on purpose. A kitchen table is where people tell the truth they will not tell in a clinic. A grandfather's blessing is an inheritance that does not require a diagnosis.
Lerner said Saturday, "We have lost a great soul." [1] He often quoted her: "Perhaps the purpose of life is to grow in wisdom and learn to love better." [1] Oren Slozberg, Commonweal's executive director, said she taught that even in illness, even in dying, there is room for wholeness. [1] Vivek Murthy, who served as surgeon general under Presidents Obama and Biden and counted himself among her students, said, "Rachel was a force of love and hope." [1] "Every conversation with her felt like coming home. Rachel changed my life multiple times." [1]
Those sentences belong in a profile because they are what the people who knew her said on the day she died. They do not belong in an institutional memorial that has not yet been written. UCSF's formal remembrance is dated August 10. This paper will not borrow Monday's language for Saturday's hour.
Remen was among the first prominent American physicians to insist that spirit and mystery had a place in recovery, and she spent a career making that insistence teachable. [1] Teachable is the unromantic word. Curricula survive their authors. The Healer's Art will be offered again in rooms she will not enter. Students will still be asked to remember why they came. That is a better monument than a building name.
A memorial gathering is set for Congregation Ner Shalom on Thursday, August 13. [1] A tribute at Commonweal in Bolinas is set for October 3, from 2 to 4 p.m. [1] The family asked that donations go to the Remen Institute at Wright State University's Boonshoft School of Medicine, or to a Commonweal healing fund in her name. [1] Those are Saturday's practical sentences. They are how a death notice does its other job.
Wellness accounts will turn her into a quote card by evening. The quotes are real. The reduction is not. A woman who survived a ten-year prognosis and then taught doctors to sit still with dying people is not a brand. She is a specific physician who died at a specific hour on a Saturday morning in August.
The paper has no Saturday hospital statement beyond the family notice, and no cause of death in that notice. [1] It will not invent a place of death from later reports. Concord can wait for a later clock. Saturday's completed stage is 8:24 a.m., age 88, and a body of work that already knew how to talk about dying without making it a defeat.
A newspaper that waited for UCSF would have missed the morning. A newspaper that filed only the titles would have missed the hour. The completed Saturday record is a healer dead at 8:24, a Crohn's diagnosis that did not keep its promise, two books that traveled in twenty languages, a course that still asks students why they are here, and colleagues who said she taught them to love better. That is a profile. It is not an institution saying goodbye.
-- NORA WHITFIELD, Chicago