I've been reading a very thoughtful book by Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D. Even though she is an MD, she has been chronically ill most of her life with an intestinal disorder. In Kitchen Table Wisdom, she tells stories about her life and the lives of her patients and the gifts found there. I came to know of her by hearing an interview with her on Terry Gross's Fresh Air. You can find the interview as podcast on iTunes. I thought she brought something else entirely to the situation of being chronically ill.
Here are three passages that I liked a lot:
pg. 30
"...I remember thinking that this disease had robbed me of my youth. I did not yet know what it had given me in exchange.
In response to these painful thoughts, a wave of intense rage flooded me, the sort of feeling I had experienced many times before. But for some reason, this time I did not drown in it. Instead, I sort of noticed it go by and something inside me said, 'You have no vitality? Here's your vitality.'
Shocked, I recognized the connection between my anger and my will to live. My anger was my will to live turned inside out. My life force was just as intense, just as powerful as my anger, but for the first time I could experience it as different and feel it directly. In that first moment of surprise, I had a glimpse of something fundamental about who I am; that at the core of things I have an intense love of life, a wish to participate fully in life and to help others do the same. Somehow this had grown large in me as a result of the very limitations that I had thought were thwarting it. Like the power of a dammed river. I had not known this before. I also knew that in its present form, as rage, this power was trapped. My anger had helped me to survive, to resist my disease, even to fight on, but in the form of anger I could not use my strength to build the kind of life I longed to live. And then I knew that I no longer needed to do it this way. I knew with absolute certainty that my pain was nobody's fault; that the world was not to blame for it. It was a moment of real freedom."
pg. 38
"...Reclaiming ourselves usually means coming to recognize and accept that we have in us both sides of everything. We are full of pride and courage, generosity and selfishness, vulnerability and strength. These things do not cancel each other out but offer us a full range of power and response to life. Life is as complex as we are. Sometimes our vulnerability is our strength, our fear develops our courage, and our woundedness is the road to our integrity. It is not an either/or world. It is a real world. In calling ourselves "heads" or "tails," we may never own and spend our human currency, the pure gold of which our coin is made."
pg. 228
"I do not think that we will be able to attain health for all until we realize that we are all providers of each other's health, and value what we have to offer each other as much as what experts have to offer us. In the years since, groups have demonstrated beyond question that problems which are not amenable to the most expert medical approaches may be resolved in community by the very people who suffer from them and therefore understand them. In such communities, the concept of woundedness breaks down and we are all wounded healers of each other. We have earned the wisdom to heal and the ability to care."
The book is called "Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories that Heal." Libraries carry it. It's probably available as a recording as well.
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