Listening Generously

This is a passage from Rachel Naomi Remen's book Kitchen Table Wisdom, read as part of a Speaking of Faith program entitled "Listening Generously: The Medicine of Rachel Naomi Remen." While this passage is particularly about doctors and patients, it could just as easily be about any number of professions.

For some time now Dieter had suspected that the chemotherapy was no longer helping him. Convinced at last of this, he spoke to his doctor and suggested that the treatments be stopped. He asked, if he could come every week just to talk. His doctor responded abruptly, 'If you refuse chemotherapy, there's nothing more I can do for you.' And so Dieter had continued to take the weekly injection in order to have those few moments of connection and understanding with his doctor. The group of people with cancer listened intently. There was another silence. Then Dieter said softly, 'My doctor's love is as important to me as his chemotherapy, but he doesn't know.'

Dieter's statement meant a great deal to me. I had not known either. Medicine is as close to love as it is to science, and its relationships matter even at the edge of life itself.

But I had yet another connection to Dieter's story. His oncologist was one of my patients. Week after week, from the depths of chronic depression, this physician would tell me that no one cared about him. He didn't matter to anyone. He was just another white coat in the hospital, a mortgage payment to his wife, a tuition check to his son. No one would notice if he vanished, as long as someone was there to make rounds or take out the garbage.

So here is Dieter bringing the same validation, the same healing to his doctor that he brought to me. But his doctor, caught up in a sense of failure because he cannot cure cancer, cannot receive it.

http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/listeninggenerously/index.shtml