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 In her book, Kitchen Table Wisdom, Stories That Heal, medical doctor and writer, Rachel Naomi Remen shares this story. When she was fourteen years old, she took a summer job working as a volunteer in a nursing home for the aged. This wasn’t easy for her. She was young, shy, and mostly afraid of elderly persons. One day she was assigned to spend an hour visiting a ninety-six-year-old woman who had not spoken for over a year and suffered from severe dementia.