Memorial for Dr. Viola Frymann, D.O.

I drove down to La Jolla early this morning to attend Dr. Frymann's memorial service. I wrote a little about Dr. Frymann's life and death a few weeks ago, and I had hoped to take the children with me, but it was difficult to rouse the boys on a Saturday morning, and I wasn't quite up to the task of taking Sophie alone, so I headed down there by myself.

Even though I was running late to make the 11:00 service, I pulled over at the overlook near Camp Pendleton because I always pulled over there back in the days when I drove down twice a week with a very young Sophie in the back of the car. We'd get out and stretch our legs and look over the wide expanse of blue. I wanted to make a ritual of my journey, and today was particularly beautiful -- the ocean a soft blue that lightened and deepened and melted into the sky. The gulls wheeled around catching the currents, and I stood and looked out over the Pacific.

When I got to the church, the service had been going on for at least a half an hour, but the Episcopal minister was giving the homily, and it only took a few minutes before I began to cry softly in the pew. Dr. Frymann was described as a woman of steely intellect and discipline who, after injuring her ankle and giving up her dream to be a ballerina, gave her entire life over to improving the lives of children through osteopathic medicine, particularly those whom other physicians had given up or declared impossible to treat. The minister aptly said that when she looked at you, it was as if her eyes were x-rays, and she could penetrate to your soul. Yes. That was my experience. I realized quite suddenly that it was almost exactly twenty years to the day since I had first brought Sophie to see Dr. Frymann, when I travelled from my home in New York City in February of 1995 and walked through the white gate of the little yellow house that sat on the bluff of La Jolla Cove and handed my sick baby over to her.

Raoul, the pianist that accompanied Dr. Frymann's treatments of Sophie and many other children back then, was there today, playing Chopin and Beethoven and Bach.  I also saw many of the people that worked at the Osteopathic Center for Children, a couple of familiar faces belonging to other mothers,  and a few of the osteopaths that were family to us all those years ago. One of them, Dr. Morelli, remembered me, and when I gave her a hug she told me Sophie taught me about angels. She always looked so intently up and around, like she saw them. I thanked her for that and for literally picking me up off the floor where I sat crying one day, overcome by fatigue and worry.

After the service, we proceeded outside to the Memorial Lawn where Dr. Frymann's ashes were interred. The minister crouched down over a small square cut out of the ground and gently shook out the ashes of this dear and powerful woman, blessing and chanting over them. I saw them swirl up and around from the small impression in the earth, the fragments blown a bit by that gentle breeze that seduced me into moving here so many years ago.

How grateful I am to have known her and to have had her hands touch and treat and heal my three children. When invited, I took the small shovel and gently placed some dirt on top of her ashes, closed my eyes and heard her voice over the gulls. I still heard her voice when I left the reception afterward and drove down the drive below the yellow cottage that is now a busy restaurant. I got out of the car, my back to the motel where I'd lived with Sophie and stood at the bluff and watched the waves crashing onto the rocks.

I know that Dr. Frymann rests in peace after a life well lived. She was one of the most influential people in my life, steadying me on this path. Her remains are buried under the grass in front of the church she loved, a bit of her blowing over the majestic Pacific. She'll live in me, in Sophie and Henry and Oliver and countless other people and children, forever and ever. Amen.

Other posts about Dr. Frymann:

Dr. Viola Frymann (1921-2016) 

How We Do It: Part XXXVII of a Series:Fragment

Dr. Viola Frymann, D.O. (1921-2016)

Dr. Frymann and Sophie, 1997

I learned today that the beloved osteopath who changed Sophie's and my family's life over twenty years ago died this week at the age of 95. All three of my children were patients of Dr. Frymann -- Sophie began treatments at ten months, when I'd fly to La Jolla for six week trips, living in a little motel by the sea. When I gave birth to both Henry and Oliver in Santa Monica, I traveled down to see Dr. Frymann when they were each less than ten days old so that she could give them a newborn treatment. She believed that treatment at birth and through infancy and childhood was of enormous benefit and freed the child from digestive issues, colic and the ailments that we've grown to expect and accept as we age (ear infections, "growing pains," back and neck pain, etc.). Over the next fifteen plus years, we made the trip down to San Diego multiple times a week and then month -- a drive that I never complained about because I knew what lay at the other end.

I credit her for setting Sophie on the path to true healing (something distinct from curing), and for ensuring the boys' vitality and ease (they were, quite simply, always jolly and rarely ill through childhood and neither ever on any antibiotic because of her treatments). I couldn't possibly describe this woman's impact on my own life and thinking. She is probably the only true healer that I will ever meet, the woman responsible for our move to California and for setting me on the path of integrative medicine and treatment. She guided me forward when I didn't know what to do. I believed Dr. Frymann when she told me about the body’s inherent ability to right itself, to heal itself, and that her work was to help the body find its optimal path. She never claimed to cure a person but to rather help that person reach his full potential. When she did speak of curing, it was in religious terms, an expression of her deep faith in Christianity and God’s power. Her work, though, was not religious, in the sense that she was a scientist who had studied and practiced osteopathic manipulation for over fifty years. If it weren't for Dr. Frymann, I have no doubt that Sophie would not be alive today nor she and her brothers in such good overall health.

She was your first ray of hope, my father emailed me this morning when I told him of her death.

Yes. She was my first ray of hope. She taught me nearly everything I know about healing and curing, about what it means to be human and whole. Her life not only affected ours but those of thousands of people around the world, and she worked and traveled and taught until her retirement at age 90, five years ago.

We will miss her and are grateful to have spent so much time, literally, under her powerful hands.

Here's an excerpt from a chapter in my book-in-progress about Dr. Frymann that gives you a small idea of her power and worth.



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Dr. Frymann believed in the inherent dignity of each child, no matter how “damaged.” She never used the word “damaged” at all, in fact. Every child is worthy and has potential. Every child can understand what is going on around him or her, able to sense the environment and whether it is positive or negative. Her beliefs resonated with me and with those who made such an effort to bring their children to her. The simplicity of those beliefs tapped into our most fervent hopes but also affirmed the things we already knew about our children.

I sat in the “quiet room” at Dr. Frymann’s office while Sophie got her treatments during my first few visits to California at the La Jolla office, flipping through old Reader’s Digests and prayer books. Sometimes, I closed my eyes and leaned my head back on the old chintz-covered armchair, my hands loose in my lap. I knew that outside the sun was shining and that the palm trees were swaying from the ocean breezes off of La Jolla Cove. I heard the faint sounds of piano music coming from the music therapist in the treatment room and the gentle opening and closing of the front gate. When I opened my eyes, I saw that a woman had walked into the office with a girl in her arms. The girl appeared to be made horizontally the way she lay flat on top of the mother’s bent arms. Her feet, twisted inward, stick-straight out, level with her head, a long black sheath of hair hanging down over the other bent arm. She made no sound and there was no way to tell, really, what her age might have been. I tried not to stare, smiled awkwardly, instead, and said hello to the woman. She sat down, still holding the horizontal child, murmuring to her. The girl didn’t move in her arms, lay straight like a board.

When Dr. Frymann came out with Sophie, she handed her to me and told me that she’d see us in two days. When I asked how Sophie “did,” she replied, “Fine. Her vitality is much better.” She then turned to the other mother and lifted the girl into her own bent arms. The transfer was effortless, and now it was Dr. Frymann who carefully balanced this child over her arms, walking back toward the treatment room. “You are an Indian princess, yes, aren’t you,” she crooned to the girl as she walked away.

How We Do It: Part XXXVII of a Series: Fragment

I took Sophie to the osteopath this morning, and she placed her gentle hands on Sophie and worked to move and heal her. In her silent room with a view of the gray Pacific, doves cooing on the sill, the doctor spoke softly and I lay my head on Sophie's stomach and closed my eyes and breathed in calming myself, breathing out smile. We spoke of Dr. Viola Frymann, the great and now very old osteopath who saw Sophie regularly when she was a baby and whose influence on me is immeasurable. I heard the gurgling of Sophie's stomach beneath my head, felt the infinitesimal jerks of her body, let tears slide out of my eyes, the memory of Sophie as a baby, the hopes for her, the compromises and acceptance, the despair and love and acceptance again, even of death. When I drove home, the cars ahead and around me glinting in a too-hot Los Angeles morning, I thought of the angry voices of the internet from that morning, those who call other mothers irresponsible for what they do and don't do for their children, the endless and interminable vaccination argument, black and white and how clicking them off, shutting those voices, xing them out, angry and stupid, doesn't still or instill anything. Sit with me, here, I think, lay your head, here, next to mine. Listen. Lower your voice. Abide.



Of course! The path to heaven doesn't lie down in flat miles. It's in the imagination with which you perceive this world, --


The Swan

Across the wide waters
     something comes
          floating—a slim
             and delicate

ship, filled
     with white flowers—
          and it moves
             on its miraculous muscles

as though time didn't exist,
     as though bringing such gifts
          to the dry shore
             was a happiness

almost beyond bearing.
     And now it turns its dark eyes,
          it rearranges
             the clouds of its wings,

it trails
     an elaborate webbed foot,
          the color of charcoal.
             Soon it will be here.

Oh, what shall I do
     when that poppy-colored beak
          rests in my hand?
             Said Mrs. Blake of the poet:

I miss my husband's company—
     he is so often
          in paradise.
             Of course! the path to heaven

doesn't lie down in flat miles.
     It's in the imagination
          with which you perceive
             this world,

and the gestures
     with which you honor it.
          Oh, what will I do, what will I say, when those
             white wings
           touch the shore?

Mary Oliver