I write a lot about bad spiritual teachers. Part of why I can tell the good ones from the bad ones is because I was blessed to have a really wonderful teacher, who swept me under her wing right after I quit my hospital job at 37 years old. Last year for Mother’s Day, when we all knew Rachel had end stage cancer, those of us doctors lucky enough to have Rachel as our mentor compiled a book for her, to honor her role as a mother in our lives. This is what I wrote. I’m sure I’ll write more, but Rachel died today at 8:24am, 57 years after doctors told her she would die by the age of 30. So for now, this is all I can muster to honor her memory.
After reading Tuesdays with Morrie, I always joked that one day, I’d write Wednesdays With Rachel.
By Lissa Rankin, MD
When I first became a “Remenista,” I’d anticipate with great enthusiasm our Wednesday night Finding Meaning in Medicine meetups at her Mill Valley home, which was just around the corner from my home in Muir Beach. I often noticed a part of me that showed up at these gatherings seriously hoping to please the teacher. I tried all the tricks and tools I learned by the age of 4 for pleasing teachers, but somehow, Rachel seemed immune to my 4 year old charms. The foods I brought for her, she couldn’t eat because of her Crohn’s disease and ileostomy. The poems I wrote for her didn’t elicit the reaction I’d hoped for. Most difficult for me, the work I tried to put out in the world, inspired by her influence on me and intended to win her approval, usually backfired.
This often led to Rachel asking me to stay behind on Wednesday night until after everyone else left. I came to call these post-meeting late nights with Rachel Wednesdays With Rachel, since I’d just read Tuesdays With Morrie.
Although I appreciated the one-on-one time, I quickly learned that this meant I was in trouble with the teacher, quite the opposite of what my approval-seeking 4 year old part was hoping to achieve. Usually, I’d upset her in some way. I’d let her down. I’d made her angry. My work was too similar to her work and I hadn’t offered appropriate attribution, Or I’d failed to ask for consent about something I should have known better about, like the time I posted a blog post about her with a photo of the two of us at Commonweal in front of a large painting of a naked man, something I hadn’t even considered might be taboo.
When I told her I wanted to be part of whatever she was doing, to join the Rachel Remen bandwagon, she said, “Don’t join something. Build something.” So I did. At one point, I bragged to her, “I’m stepping into my power!”
She corrected me. “No.You’re stepping into your ambition.” I felt deflated.
No matter what I did, I couldn’t seem to get it right, like the more I tried to please her, to win her affection, to broadcast her work into the world, to prove how much I appreciated her, to thank her for saving me when I was at my lowest point, the more it felt like Rachel just didn’t like me. That pain felt familiar- just like my unpleasable mother.
One day, when I was desperate and despairing, when my attempts to please her had failed once again, Rachel’s eyes and voice softened. Calling me “sweetheart” in the most motherly of voices, using a term of endearment she didn’t usually apply to me, she explained that I could quit trying to impress her now, that I could relax and just be myself. She said she wanted to let me in on a little secret, that she was never going to approve of me, no matter how much of a dog and pony show I put on for her.
I was confused.
“Approval,” she said, “is just another form of judgment. It’s positive judgment instead of negative judgment, but it’s judgment nonetheless. If I judge you in a positive way, if I approve of you, then I can always withhold my approval. I could use that threat of withdrawing my approval to control you, just like your mother did.” She swore she would never do that to me, that her love wasn’t for sale and I couldn’t buy it with flowers or love-bombing poems or acts of service intended to win her love or professional achievements to finally prove that I was good enough.
“I won’t approve of you because I love you, and that’s not ever going to go away, whether I approve of you or not.”
I heard her words all the way down to my most ruined heart
I didn’t immediately stop trying to impress Rachel after that. Old habits die hard. But something young, something vigilant, hardworking, and distrusting did eventually soften and fall away. I didn’t need to impress Rachel, because she just loved me, just the way I am, fucked up parts and all. This is how she loves all of us, I learned over time, not just from her words, but from her unconditionally loving actions.
Years later, Rachel was the one on speaker phone with me when my mother took her last labored breath just before midnight on the night before Halloween, when my mother died at her home, under Hospice care. No Hospice workers were in the room at the time, but Rachel was there. After the last labored breath, Rachel spoke to all of us in the room. It was me, my sister, my mother’s two sisters, my daughter…and Rachel. My mother had three brothers, a son, and two grandsons, but somehow, this dying thing became women’s work.
Rachel said, “Take a moment to be with the silence in the room.”
The room had been so noisy with the death rattle of my mother’s last moments alive and the loud sobbing tears of the rest of us. We would never have noticed that moment of silence at the end of the out breath, just like Rachel prompts us to do at the end of each FMM meditation, had she not reminded us. I will cherish that moment of soft, relieved silence for the rest of my life.
I had been grieving hard over the loss of my mother, getting up at 5am during Hospice care to write about my grief before giving my mother her first dose of meds of the day. So I was shocked when I woke up at 5am the morning after she died, after only a few hours of sleep. I felt enraged. This bewildered and frightened me, so I called Rachel, worried that I’d turned into some kind of sociopath.
Rachel said, “Thank your mother, Lissa. She left you a precious inheritance. She gave you your anger back.”
Her comment reminded me of the New Years Eve I’d spent with Rachel, SARK, and Karen Drucker, playing The Transformation Game. Rachel picked the Appreciation card and decided to give me what felt like a backhanded compliment at the time. She said she appreciated me because somehow, people could do the most God awful things to me, and I’d stick around and tolerate their mistreatment, maybe even thanking them for being such a good tor-mentor that I could learn from their abuse.
This part of me seemed to be crazy-making to Rachel. When I’d tell her something distressing that someone else had done, she’d challenge me. “Where is your anger? Why aren’t you enraged right now?” She insisted that my mother had stolen my anger, which confused me.
I just couldn’t feel my anger most of the time. I felt compassion for my perpetrators. But I also felt confused over why I kept getting betrayed and exploited.
Rachel was right. When my mother died, she gave me back that anger. That anger prompted me to get into the best therapy of my life with a Jewish New Yorker of a certain age who was one of the few women professors at Princeton back when women weren’t becoming professors at Princeton. I told her she reminded me of Rachel, and she felt flattered. She’d admired Rachel’s work for much of her life.
When Rachel got cancer soon after my mother died, I had a part that was terrified of losing both my birth mother and my spiritual mother so close together. I told Rachel about my fear, and she assured me she wasn’t dying anytime soon. She swore that she would warn me before she died and that I should enjoy this time that she’s still in a body, because I’d still have privacy until she was gone. Once she was on the other side, she said, I’d never get rid of her because she’d be there right beside me, looking out for me for all eternity.
But I didn’t believe her and I cried every time I thought about losing her, just like I had done when I imagined my mother gone. I tried doing my Internal Family Systems work with the part of me terrified of losing Rachel. I attempted to convince that scared part that it had me now, that I would be its mother, even if Rachel left her body and went wherever she was meant to go next.
This part was not buying it. She called me “Shit Rachel,” as in I’d be a shitty substitute for Rachel. I did a therapy session around this dynamic and finally had to concede that this part was right. I would be Shit Rachel. I’d never be capable of replacing Rachel for my hurt parts. But I could be something else, something different, the mother I never quite had- for myself.
The therapist who helped me heal told me I’d been lucky. Rachel had been my “good enough” mother, the way she’s been for so many of us. She helped me play out just enough of my childhood dynamics to give me a restorative experience, a different ending, to help rewire my neural circuitry to cure me of my incessant approval-seeking.
I approached her years later with embarrassment and shame and asked her how she put up with me back then. How did she and all the rest of you put up with what a hot mess I was, how hard I tried to get you all to like me, how traumatized I was, how attention-seeking I was, how much I craved your validation?
She looked at me with those same soft eyes and said, “Lissa, you were our Siena.”
And just like that, the spell my mother had cast on me was broken.
Siena, who now goes by Mira, is my wonderful daughter. Rachel gifted me with that beautiful image of the little girl I love. If I was Rachel’s Siena, if I was the Siena to the elders in the room, then of course I’d be easy to love, even with all my flaws. I’d be adorable in my messiness, lovable in my imperfections, forgivable in my mistakes, just the way I feel about my daughter. And as I become an elder, maybe I can pass on that gift to the next generation of Sienas.
At one point, when Rachel and I were talking about writing, legacy, her impact on my work, and how writers mentor other writers, she told me there is a point at which someone’s influence over you becomes so ingrained that it becomes you. She says she periodically reads things I write and can see the ways that her influence over me has become so much a part of me that, although I try to give her credit anytime I realize I’ve been inspired by her, I may not even remember to quote her. The idea may feel like it’s coming directly from me, even though the seeds for it may have been implanted by Rachel 15 years ago. She said that when this happens, she doesn’t feel like those she’s mentored have “stolen” her work, but that her legacy is complete. She lives on in each of us. Her legacy may be colored by our own personalities but growing from the same seeds into full bloom, long after she leaves us to walk beside us from the other side.
Rachel, words feel vastly inadequate to express my gratitude for all you’ve done for me, for all of us, for this community, and for the world you’ve impacted. My debt of gratitude to you feels impossible to repay, so we can only pay it forward. May you feel the love of all of us that you’ve mothered in your own way and may you know how profound your love has transformed us all. As my own mother used to say, “I love you to the moon and back.”
I can’t quite imagine life without Rachel in it. And yet, that moment has come. I cannot give words to my gratitude that Rachel has been in my life for almost twenty years. My parts that have attached to her so strongly still think I’m going to be Shit Rachel, and they’re right. I will never replace her presence in my life. But I also know she will never leave me, because she lives in me always.
If you’ve been touched by Rachel Naomi Remen, whether through reading Kitchen Table Wisdom or My Grandfather’s Blessings, or by other way she might have impacted you, please tell me your stories. I am reaching out across the ethers to anyone who was touched by her. My heart is with us all in our grief and gratitude.
I will be writing more about Rachel’s impact on me, but for now, I can only say….wow. And thank you Rachel. For ever and ever and ever.
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