She has been a doctor for more than fifty years. She has also had Crohn's disease since she was fifteen.
Which means she has sat on both sides of the table.
Rachel Naomi Remen spent decades working with cancer patients — people facing things medicine could not fix. And she noticed something that her training had not prepared her for: the most important things often happened not during treatment, but in ordinary conversation. At the kitchen table. In the hallway. In the quiet moment before the doctor came in.
Stories, she found, could do something medicine couldn't. They could make suffering meaningful. They could locate a person inside their pain instead of being erased by it.
Her grandfather was a Hasidic Rabbi who blessed her every Friday as a child. He taught her: 'You are seen. You matter. You are enough.' She carried those words into every exam room for the rest of her life.
Healing, she wrote, is not the same as curing. Curing is what medicine does when it works. Healing is what happens when a person finds a way to be whole even in the middle of what cannot be fixed.
What story have you been carrying that deserves to be told?
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