lit a candle 7 Sept 2026Kitchen Table Wisdom changed how I think about what it means to be sick. She made space for the whole person, not just the disease. A real loss.
Their story
Rachel Naomi Remen, MD (February 8, 1938 to August 8, 2026) was an American physician, medical educator, and bestselling author who helped bring whole-person, relationship-centered care into mainstream medicine. She died at her home in Concord, California, on the morning of August 8, 2026, at 8:24 a.m., surrounded by loved…
Rachel Naomi Remen, MD (February 8, 1938 to August 8, 2026) was an American physician, medical educator, and bestselling author who helped bring whole-person, relationship-centered care into mainstream medicine. She died at her home in Concord, California, on the morning of August 8, 2026, at 8:24 a.m., surrounded by loved ones. She was 88.
Born in New York City into a family that included nine doctors and two nurses across two generations, Remen later joked that she was the only pre-med in her kindergarten class. Her parents were socialists who treated organized religion with suspicion. Her spiritual education came instead from her maternal grandfather, Rabbi Meyer Ziskind, a Russian-born Orthodox rabbi and student of Kabbalah. He blessed her on Friday evenings, told her the story of the birthday of the world, and taught her that brokenness can hide sparks of light waiting to be lifted up. That story of tikkun olam, repairing the world one heart at a time, became the moral spine of her teaching and of her late children's book.
At fifteen she was diagnosed with severe Crohn's disease and given a short prognosis (accounts vary between roughly ten years and death by forty). She lived with the illness for more than sixty-five years, through more than a dozen major surgeries, an ileostomy, and later additional serious illness. She often said the experience made her both physician and patient, and that her wounds trained her capacity for compassion. Believing she would not live long enough to finish a marriage or raise children, she chose neither. She channeled that fierce, unfinished life into medicine and story.
She earned her M.D. from Cornell University Medical College (Weill Cornell) in 1962, when women remained a small minority in U.S. medicine. She trained in pediatrics and pediatric endocrinology and joined the faculty at Stanford School of Medicine. In the 1960s she encountered the Human Potential Movement at Esalen Institute in Big Sur. That encounter, she later told mentees, redirected her away from a conventional academic track toward mind-body and meaning-centered work. By the mid-1970s she was counseling people with cancer and their families. With Michael Lerner she co-founded the Commonweal Cancer Help Program in Bolinas, California (widely dated to 1986), serving as medical director for decades. The week-long residential retreats treated body, emotion, and spirit without claiming to cure cancer. Bill Moyers featured the program in the 1993 PBS series Healing and the Mind, bringing Remen's soft-spoken insistence on listening to a national audience.
In 1991 she founded what became the Remen Institute for the Study of Health and Illness (RISHI), later affiliated with Wright State University Boonshoft School of Medicine and renamed for her in 2016. As Clinical Professor of Family and Community Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and later Clinical Professor Emeritus, she created The Healer's Art, a discovery-model elective on meaning, grief, service, and calling. Medical students named its core practice generous listening: witnessing what is true for another person without fixing, ranking, or competing. The course spread from a UCSF basement elective to more than ninety U.S. medical schools and schools in multiple countries abroad. Among those shaped by it was Vivek Murthy, later U.S. Surgeon General, who called her a force of love and hope and said every conversation with her felt like coming home.
Her books carried the same voice into living rooms. Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (1996) and My Grandfather's Blessings (2000) became New York Times bestsellers, translated into more than twenty languages, with combined sales in the millions. Earlier she had written The Human Patient; later she published The Little Book of Kitchen Table Wisdom and the children's book The Birthday of the World (2022), a retelling of the Kabbalistic light story for a new generation. She received the Bravewell recognition as a pioneer of integrative and relationship-centered care, UCSF's Gold-Headed Cane Award (2013), three honorary degrees (including from the University of San Francisco), and induction into the Marin Women's Hall of Fame (2005).
Remen's public teaching stayed clear of cultic hierarchy. She framed medicine as a spiritual path marked by compassion, harmlessness, service, reverence for life, courage, and love, while insisting that science can cure only a fraction of human suffering and that the rest must be healed. She appeared with Krista Tippett on On Being, with Charlie Rose, on NBC News segments about teaching doctors to listen, and in countless graduation and keynote addresses.
In later years, after a hip fracture made her steep Mill Valley house unsafe, she moved to Concord to be near cousins. She died under hospice care at home. A memorial gathering was held at Congregation Ner Shalom; a public celebration of her life is set for October 3, 2026, at Gallery Commonweal in Bolinas (also on Zoom). Donations have been directed to RISHI and to a Rachel Naomi Remen Commonweal Healing Fund. Her memory, in the Jewish phrase she would have recognized, remains a blessing.
Biography adapted from Wikipedia Rachel Naomi Remen; Legacy.com obituary; JWeekly (Lea Loeb, 17 Aug 2026); Commonweal memoriam and staff tribute (Oren Slozberg); RISHI memorial announcement; National Library of Medicine Cha. Wikipedia ↗
In their own words
“The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen.”
Widely cited teaching from her writing and interviews on healing presence
“We thought we could cure everything, but it turns out that we can only cure a small amount of human suffering. The rest of it needs to be healed, and that's different.”
On Being with Krista Tippett, on curing vs. healing
“We burn out not because we don't care, but because we don't grieve.”
On Being / Healer's Art teaching on loss
“Perhaps the purpose of life is to grow in wisdom and learn to love better.”
Frequently quoted by Commonweal colleagues after her death (Michael Lerner via Commonweal memoriam)
“Helping, fixing, and serving represent three different ways of seeing life. When you help, you see life as weak. When you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole.”
Widely attributed teaching from her essays/talks on service vs. fixing
“Life offers its wisdom generously. Everything teaches. Not everyone learns.”
Frequently reprinted line associated with My Grandfather's Blessings / public talks
Photos
1Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen
by People Forever
That sentence saved me too. More than once.