In my family, people like to tell an anecdote about a favorite uncle, Bill, who had the reputation of being kind and open to everyone he met. Such was his good nature that he would greet strangers with warmth, so much so that we used to fear others taking advantage of him.

One day, it is told, Bill was coming down the front stairs inside his house. At the same time, another man, rather tipsy from imbibing too much, was walking up. Bill, according to the story, hailed the intruder with a friendly greeting, and then continued his way down and out the door.

This tale, not without fictitious added details perhaps, gets repeated often when our extended family gathers for anniversaries or other events. The younger members who have heard the story more than once are probably thoroughly bored with it by now. It’s the kind of tale that I myself in my younger days used to turn off as not worth repetition. I was looking instead for things that I had not heard before.

Now that I have reached a certain age, however, I have come to see that the telling of such stories can easily be underrated. Perhaps they amount to a rite that has great importance for the elders of the family and even for the younger members as well.

Writer James Hillman tells of interrupting his uncle in the middle of a time-worn story. “You’ve already told me that,” the nephew said. His uncle’s riposte, delivered at lightening speed, was “I like telling it.” Under his breath, the uncle probably said (as Hillman imagines), “And what the hell is wrong with telling it again? Don’t you know anything about the pleasure of telling the same stories?”

Of his uncle, Hillman adds, “He knew the pleasure of the groove.” He goes on to suggest that it is shortsighted to judge repetition as an addiction. “Why not, instead, conceive of the need for novelty as an addiction?” he asks.

In exploring the time-honored story, this Jungian analyst suggests that the story genre causes boredom only if you listen to it for facts. If, for example, grandmother tells about a fire that almost destroyed her house and details who did what to escape, the mere facts might leave listeners cold.

However, Hillman says, “The story is also a lesson about concealed dangers, about protecting ‘home,’ about family collaboration, and about the character of each of the ‘characters’ whose styles emerge through the emergency.”

Stories like the grandmother’s aim to establish a permanency that, amid the ceaseless flow of life’s events, reassure us that some things stay the same. “It is as if the soul begs for the same stories so that it knows that something will last.”

You may be tempted to dismiss this kind of analysis as the feverish speculations of an imagination run amok. But it does help me realize how superficial I can be in dismissing family rites and rituals cherished by friends. They do indeed often have the power to feed the soul and to enhance our lives.

Hillman carries it even further. “That forgetful old uncle, that tiresome grandmother offer a foretaste of the eternal. They function as ancestors, reminding us that recapitulation is the way the world really works.”

The writer concludes the matter thus: “Nothing is more tedious than practicing your scales or mumbling your beads. Yet the accomplishments of art, the efficacy of prayer, the beauty of ritual, and the force of character depend on petty repetitions any instant of which, taken for itself alone, seems utterly useless.”

If soul is what counts most, then family stories would seem to have great value indeed. Those who have cultivated “the pleasure of the groove” may have more wisdom than we think. Whether highly educated or not, they develop a sense of self-worth as tellers of the tale. They are fulfilling a role held important always and everywhere, I suspect, because it’s a powerful instrument for continuity.

If Hillman is right in suggesting that repetition does indeed point toward the eternal, then its spiritual content is even richer. “Is that all there is?” remains a potent question demanding an answer. Perhaps we can find in the traditions of family story-telling signs that point onward and upward. The actual stories may sound hokey sometimes but they can come freighted with values that we ignore only at our peril.

We could do worse than to ponder what Thomas Lynch writes in his 1998 book of poems, Still Life in Milford: “How we repeat ourselves, like stars in the dark night, / and after Darwin, Freud and popes and worlds at war, / we are still our father’s sons and daughters / still our mother’s darling girls and boys, / aging first, then aged then ageless.”

Richard Griffin

Diane Meier, M.D., buys tall stacks of paperback editions of Tolstoy’s classic story, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” This she does so that the students, medical residents, and others whom she supervises can read this inspired account of a man who refuses to face the truth about his approaching death. She believes that this narrative can help awaken young doctors to end-of-life issues.

Dr. Meier, founder of the palliative care program at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City, takes a leading role in the second program of Bill Moyers’ public television series “On Our Own Terms.” This series, broadcast in Boston this week, champions what Moyers calls “a different kind of care” for people who cannot be cured of life-threatening disease.

In his famous novella centering on the dying Ivan Ilyitch, Tolstoy showed in stark detail how fatal illness devastates a man who is emotionally cut off from family and friends and from his own inner self. His pain, both physical and spiritual, is intense and he suffers a devastating crisis of belief. Only in his last moments, through the compassion of a young man servant, does Ivan discover his soul and see the darkness of his dying yield to light.

Health care pioneers such as Dr. Meier are shown in the Moyers series as leading the way toward a set of medical priorities different from those normal in the American health care system at large. They focus first on pain and work to control and relieve the suffering of their terminally ill patients. These physicians are trying to get their colleagues to recognize that pain is both debilitating and unnecessary.

Doctors are not the only ones who fail to see the importance of dealing with pain. Patients themselves often believe it undesirable to eliminate pain altogether. So do members of their families.

That’s the way it was with Matt Wilson, only 23 years old, who is shown dying at Mt. Sinai. His family fears that, if Matt’s pain is relieved, then he will lose his desire to fight for life.

Similarly, another patient, Harold Resnick, refuses pain medication at first because he is afraid that taking medication will be equivalent to resigning himself to death. Dr. Meier begins talking with these patients and their families so that they can see how relieving pain can help them cope better with their actual situation.

Watching these people wrestle with devastating illness is admittedly not easy. I have taken no pleasure in doing so, nor in writing about the Moyers series. However, I stand convinced that end-of-life  issues have crucial importance for everyone. I return to these questions, despite the fearful emotions they stir in us, because I believe that dealing with the issues in advance can increase our chances of accomplishing vital human tasks before dying.

Joyce Kerr is another Mt. Sinai patient who is dying of cancer. She decides to leave the hospital so that she can die at home. There she will have support from hospice services and from family members. Her daughter, Nancy Akbari, reasons this way: “How many nights did she sit with me, it’s just nice to be able to try and give some of that back.”

Mrs. Kerr’s doctor, Sean Morrison, visits regularly and talks with her about her experience. He also helps family members by explaining, with much compassion, what they can expect at each stage of their mother’s dying.

To make this approach to care of the dying the usual way will require drastic changes in the American health care system. Physicians, nurses, and other medical team members must learn to practice medicine differently from the way they learned it in school. They have to recognize that attention to the patient is ultimately more important than attention to the disease. Thus talking and listening become vital approaches to patient care.

These pioneers must also deal with a health care system that has different priorities. Financial incentives often act as a barrier to appropriate care. A huge number of Americans lack health insurance to cover them in times of crisis. Regulations frequently act as barriers to people getting the kind of care they need.  

But the health care reformers shown in the “On Our Own Terms” series are motivated by their conviction that the present system does not serve dying people decently. “I’ve seen too many people die in our intensive care unit in ways that you and I would never want to die,” a doctor tells Bill Moyers.

Palliative care – the relief and control of pain along with attention to the physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual needs of dying patients – can make a vital difference in the way we die. Bill Moyers and his collaborators deserve credit for raising the issues unflinchingly and presenting, in real-life situations, professionals, patients and their families, who have the courage and wisdom to show how it can be done.

Richard Griffin

Bill Bartholome, is a pediatrician who has become terminally ill with cancer. Of his discovery that he is going to die, he says, “I experienced a kind of grief that I had never known.” Television cameras follow closely the saga of his decline and approaching death as Bill chooses to forgo curative treatment in favor of relief of pain.

Bill Bartholome is only one among dozens of people the viewer meets in Bill Moyers’ new public television series “A Death of One’s Own.” This four-part series is ready to air on Boston’s Channel 2, starting on Sunday evening, September 10 and running the next three nights from 9:30 to 10:30. (The programs will be repeated in early morning hours on Channel 44.)

With Bill Bartholome and offering him loving support during his ordeal is Pam, his fiancée. At this time, she follows through and marries Bill, much to his amazement. “I could not believe that she would do it,” he exclaims.

Living day by day with the knowledge that his death is approaching, transforms life for Bill. Agonizing as this realization certainly is, it makes him appreciate living as never before. Though he says “I am in contact with the skeleton that I am becoming,” he also witnesses to  the arrival of another springtime as “an incredible miracle.”

It’s not how long you live that makes life valuable, Bill comes to see.  When his death comes, some months after we first meet him, he has arrived at a certain level of peace. “Thanks for letting me care for you,” Pam told him then, knowing that he would no longer be able to argue against this sentiment of hers. At that point she was grieving for him, experiencing what writer and professional undertaker Thomas Lynch says by way of commentary, “Grieving is the tax on loving people – the intimate contract.”

These programs are not always easy to watch. As Moyers himself admits, “It’s not pretty, looking at a dying person.” My own emotions, as I went through preview tapes, ran the gamut from pity for others to fear for myself, with many stops between. Often my eyes watered as I saw what happens to many dying people, especially those who suffer added burdens of poverty and isolation.

It is hard to know whom to admire most. The patients who struggle to preserve dignity amid end-of-life crises certainly stir respect, among many other responses. But so do members of the health care staffs – physicians, nurses, aides, hospice workers, and others – who struggle to relieve pain and help patients die with some degree of peace.

Dying this way is denied to altogether too many Americans. Surveys show that most of us want to die at home. However, the stark reality is that four out of five of us actually die in hospitals or nursing homes. And, even worse, many of us die in pain that could and should be controlled and relieved. One of Bill Moyers’ prime reasons for creating this series is to change the American way of death.

Some of the doctors one meets in this series are trying to do this, while struggling against the force of the medical establishment and national priorities. The pioneering physicians shown here, along with their nurse collaborators and other professionals, display both deep sympathy with patients and their families, and, at the same time, passionate disapproval of the system under which they have to work.

A wonderfully compassionate nurse named Edwina Taylor says of her dying patients, “That’s the greatest gift you can give to a person, is to really listen.” Diane Meier, a physician who started the palliative care unit at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City, says of her nine years of medical training, “ I did not have a single lecture in pain management.”

Greg Gramelspacher, a doctor who works with poor people in Indianapolis, says, “I’ve seen too many people die in our intensive care unit in ways that you or I would never want to die.”

And Amos Baily, a youthful-looking, marvelously sympathetic doctor in Birmingham, Alabama, is trying to introduce palliative or comfort care, into the mainstream of medical practice there. “I saw bad things happening,” he comments, and I wanted to fix it.”

The first patient mentioned here, Bill Bartholome, said of one group of his care providers, “Dying without hospice is like having surgery without anesthesia.” As if in commentary, the founder of the Zen Hospice Center in San Francisco, Frank Ostaseski, says of hospice work, “We’ve been doing this with each other for hundreds of years – we’ve just forgotten.”

Bill Moyers thinks the time is ripe for radical change. If we are to improve the chances for a good death, citizens must act now. Moyers hopes that discussion groups all around the country will form to talk about the issues and to plan agendas for change.

This column can provide little more than an introduction a series rich in detail.  More information is available at 800 962-2973. Related material can be found on the web at http://www.pbs.org/wnet/onourownterms/community/index.html.

Richard Griffin 

Most therapeutic techniques that are employed to promote relaxation hold little attraction for me. For years, I have failed to profit from controlled breathing, for example, a practice that works for many other people. Even meditation, which I have long practiced within the classic tradition of western spirituality, does little to relieve my anxiety or to soothe bodily stress.

For this reason, I felt somewhat wary in accepting a longstanding invitation from one of my readers, Phyllis Reichart of Watertown, to experience Jin Shin Jyutsu, the therapeutic technique that she practices. This 42-year-old single mother is a certified practitioner of what her brochure describes as an “ancient energy-harmonizing art that can help reduce stress and promote health and well-being.”

Jin Shin Jyutsu traces its origins to ancient times in Japan. However, it fell into obscurity for centuries until rediscovered in the early 1900s by a Japanese master who devoted his life to its development. In the 1950s, it was introduced to the United States by a woman named Mary Burmeister who took the lead in spreading it around this county.

Phyllis Reichart became involved in this therapeutic practice five years ago after having pursued a career as an educator. Her motivation has been to help people to find more peace of soul and body. Older people like me, she believes, can profit from this discipline, especially if they are experiencing symptoms of tension or illness for the first time.

Given my misgivings about such practices, I agreed to take part in this exercise somewhat warily but in the spirit of adventure. Though Jin Shin Jyutsu was entirely new and unknown to me, I trusted that it would do me no harm, and might possibly deliver on some of its promises. It helped greatly that Phyllis Reichart was so patient in answering the questions of this first-time wayfarer.

It is gratifying to report here that the one-hour session introducing me to this Japanese art proved both enjoyable and, as I hoped, relaxing. To my surprise, it also turned out to be subtly and agreeably energizing as well. For the next couple of days I felt my spirits notably higher than usual.

These positive results emerged even though I remain, if not dubious, at least agnostic about the rationale behind the art. This explanation attributes undesirable physical and mental symptoms of stress to “blocked energy flows.” It believes that these blockages can by opened by making contact with certain  pressure points on the surface of the body.

Practitioners begin this exercise by feeling your pulse to determine your current flow of energy and state of well-being. Then, by gently placing their hands on “Safety Energy Locks” located at various bodily sites, therapists can begin to clear out energy blocks and you can start to experience “renewed vitality and harmony.”

As already noted, personal lack of faith in this explanation of bodily dynamics did not prevent me from enjoying the whole experience. From the beginning, when I lay down on the table, after removing only my shoes and wristwatch, I felt the practitioner’s touch as soothing and the procedure agreeable.

The therapist does not do any massage nor manipulation of muscles. Instead she proceeds by merely placing either her fingertips or her whole hand on each the body’s 52 primary locations (26 on each side.)

Phyllis Reichart showed herself gentle and sympathetic throughout as I submitted to this unfamiliar process. At several points, she explained what she was doing in order to allay whatever anxiety I might have felt as a beginner. Restful music played nearby. From an adjoining room I could hear Phyllis’ four-year-old daughter happily playing under the supervision of a caretaker.

Before moving her hand to each new site, Phyllis would try to sense when the vital energy had been successfully harmonized with the previously opened locations. These points on the body, by the way, correspond almost identically to the sites used in acupuncture and other such disciplines.

At the session’s end, Phyllis gave me materials designed to help me carry on the therapy on my own. One is entitled “Harmonizing of Attitudes through Fingers” and indicates “how to get rid of worry fast.” Though I welcome anything that can relieve anxiety quickly, long experience makes me doubt that such a thing is possible.

Later years, I believe, are favorable times for “experimenting with truth.” This phrase of Gandhi first gave me inspiration long ago and continues to do so now.

This Gandhian framework I use in evaluating my brief experience with Jin Shin Jyutsu. It introduced me to a new and different worldview. It opened up a new approach for coping with stress, adding to already familiar methods. It revealed more of the mysterious connections between the spiritual and the physical sides of human existence. And it showed me once again the beauty and power in human touch.

Anyone wishing for more information about this therapy can tap into its web site at www.jinshinjyutsu.com. [link no longer active]

Richard Griffin