Coma Survivor, MD, Clinical Professor of Family and Community
Medicine, Storyteller, Compassionate Listener
My Grandfather's Blessings: Stories of Strength, Refuge, and Belonging
I know if I listen attentively to someone, to their
essential self, their soul, as it were, I often find that
at the deepest, most unconscious level, they can
sense the direction of their own healing and wholeness.*
When Rachel Naomi Remen was fifteen, her mother had been thrust into the world of a parent's greatest fear—the loss of her daughter's life. One night, Rachel had fallen asleep in her college dormitory room and did not awaken from a debilitating coma until six months later. Her future was described by the physicians as bleak—she had Crohn’s disease. They said that her life would be lived as an invalid needing many surgeries and most likely she would only live about twenty-five more years. Rachel’s father, fearful for his only daughter, and without consulting her mother seated nearby, quietly listening, had peremptorily told Rachel that she would not be returning to college. Raised as a pampered and indulged child who had become accustomed to having her own way because of that, Rachel had burst out, angry and insistent, that she would be returning to college, and it would be regardless of medical opinion. Unwilling to accept her passionate reply, her father then threatened not to pay her tuition.
Not until two years later would Rachel learn how terrified her mother had been that day when she heard about Rachel's future; but the physicians' diagnosis had not been the most frightening part of it. She knew that if Rachel's dreams died, the disease would take over. During that initial and tense impasse at the hospital, she had contradicted her husband for the first time in her life. A secret bank account she'd kept for years would provide money for Rachel's tuition, and to Rachel she had said, "You can have it all."*
Twenty-four hours after the diagnosis, Rachel's mother signed Rachel out of the hospital. She was unconcerned that it was against medical advice. She was a superbly trained public health nurse, and she had a plan. They flew in a small plane to Rachel's college where for six months Rachel's mother took care of her. She took her to classes, and pushed her wheelchair when Rachel was too tired to walk. After her mother left, Rachel still kept pushing herself to her limits, and from doing so, in my way of seeing it, she created a miracle—for she began to feel a new strength that she hadn't known before
Many years later, in 2012, at the age of seventy-four, Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen spoke to the American Women's Medical Association (AWMA). She arrived without a topic, but checking a recorded message from her staff, she realized what it would be. Her staff had described it as giving a talk to "medicine women."* This brought her laughter, as well as her inspiration. She spoke about "the wisdom of the deep feminine, [and] about the emergence of the deep feminine in medicine and its power to heal contemporary scientific medicine and make it whole."* She told her story and the stories of her patients, extending her hope that the listeners might be reminded of their own stories. "A good story is like a compass," she explained. "It points to something universal, something unchanging, and it invites us to reflect and to move through the world a little differently."* She ended her talk answering questions about the course she had developed called "The Healer's Art," which is presently taught in 70 medical schools both in America and abroad.
My Grandfather's Blessings was published in 2001. By now, the cover of my book is dog-eared and partially torn off from frequent opening, its pages faded holders of copious checkmarks, notes, and abundant pencil-enclosed lines. I had read and reread it during my four years as an Emotional Health Intuitive Counselor. Then when my spiritual journey took me to India, it was among a handful of books that went with me. Twenty-five years later, My Grandfather's Blessings made a return trip to America in my new assignment there—still a traveler among only a handful of books.
In Dr. Remen's book, I personally found two compassionate listeners—both Rachel, as an oncologist, and her mother, who had undoubtedly been listening for years to her daughter describing her passion to become a doctor. Two other recent Purely Prema blog posts have also included views of mothering.* For the first time, I have reread parts of My Grandfather's Blessings with the new awareness that I do not remember my mother as a compassionate listener. "I knew that she had always loved me; yet as a child unable to tell her, I hadn't felt as loved as I wanted."*
I was sensitive and vulnerable in my childhood, and did not develop a strong sense of myself. This was a discovery that came many years later when leading inner child groups. Using the technique of dominant handwriting and drawing my inner parent voice with my dominant hand and my inner child's voice with my non-dominant hand, I had revisited a situation where I was bullied by my friends who had pushed me into a fenced-in area for a dog, all the while mocking me from outside the locked gate. I had felt scared and humiliated and had bent down as if retying my sneaker to hide my tears. All but one friend left. Jane had unlocked the gate and ridden home with me. When I told my mother, she said, "That's nothing." Those words had lived hidden in storage in me, until that night when, as the inner mother of my inner child, I became the mother I had needed, now able to comfort myself with my own compassion.
Fifteen years after my counseling practice experiences, I was living in India. One morning, as I felt the sun's warmth pouring through the tall, broad windows facing north and east in my large bedroom, I suddenly said, in a loud voice that startled me, "I AM ME!" and remained unmoving—amazed. Then in a moment of understanding, I grinned. I had finally separated from my mother. Recalling the writing of John Bradshaw on the inner child, I reviewed his words on the five aspects of growth experienced from infancy to age twenty-six. Under "Identity," I found that my three words had been that of a toddler, but now, with an appropriate development of autonomy over the years, they had become a psychological birth* at age seventy-four.
My realization is, "When the timing of learning is accepted as having a purpose beyond our understanding, there may be leaps in awareness about oneself and they may come about for others as well."
* Rachel Naomi Remen, My Grandfather's Blessings: Stories of Strength, Refuge, and Belonging (New York: The Berkeley Publishing Group, 2001), 90.
* Ibid., 291.
* Rachel Naomi Remen, "The Vision and Voice of Women in Medicine Since 1915." A talk given to the American Women's Medical Association (AWMA). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xVrKpf9UGk.
* Ibid.
* Ibid.
* Purely Prema, "Bees: Mothers, Emily Dickinson, and The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd," July 6, 2022. "Play: A Playful Child Lives in Every Adult Part Two, May 4, 2022."
* Prema Jasmine Camp, A Flower for God: A Memoir (Seattle, WA: Wilson Duke Press, 2021), 112. Author’s note: Chapter 9, "Discovering My Mother," offers a full view of my mother as a courageous and talented woman.
* John Bradshaw, Homecoming: Reclaiming and Healing Your Inner Child (New York: Bantam Books, 1992), 105.