After all these years of listening it seems to me that the essential quality of the human soul is uniqueness. Each of us is one of a kind. None of us… - Rachel Naomi Remen

Dieter said softly, 'My doctor's love is as important to me as his chemotherapy, but he does not know.' Dieter's statement meant a great deal to me. I had not known either. For a long time, I had carried the belief that as a physician my love didn't matter and the only thing of value I had to offer was my knowledge and skill. My training had argued me out of my truth. Medicine is as close to love as it is to science, and its relationships matter even at the edge of life itself.

the hospital to tape it to the closed door of Dr. X’s office. I had signed it and on the way back to my bed I began to worry. What if I had done something really foolish? If the surgical resident didn’t care about such things, why should Dr. X? I was off call the next day and, exhausted, I spent most of the time asleep. When I returned to the hospital for the evening shift, the pediatric day resident told me that Immy was no better. For the next few hours I took care of whatever was most urgently needed on the service, but later in the evening I stopped by the Intensive Care Unit to examine Immy and speak with her family. I found her parents in the waiting room. Together we went to see Immy. She was still unconscious. Leaning over to listen to her chest, I suddenly noticed a medal pinned to her hospital gown. Turning to her parents in relief, I asked if it was another one. “No,” her mother said, “it was the same one that was lost.” Dr. X had come that afternoon and brought it to them. I told them how glad I was that it had been found. “Yes,” her father said. “We are too.” Then he smiled. “She is safe now, no matter what happens,” he told me.

Seeing the life force in human beings brings medicine [and education and healing] closer to gardening than to carpentry. I don't fix a rosebush. A rosebush is a living process, and as a student of that process, I can learn to prune, to nurture and cooperate with it in ways that allow it best to 'happen,' to maximize the life force in it even in the presence of disease [and difficulty and pain]. Simply trusting process has a great power.

A colleague of mine was telling me about the birth of her grandchild. At one point in a long and difficult labor, her daughter had called out to her for help. My colleague experienced this as a moment of impotence, feeling that there was nothing that she could do to fix things. She had sat there holding her child's hand, trusting the process of birth and feeling that this was not enough. But perhaps it is. The trust of process that comes from personal knowledge and experience is really the foundation of helping and comforting one another. Without it all of our actions are driven by fear. Fear is the friction in all transitions.