In one recording, for example, a mother talks about staving off death to attend her son’s high school graduation. In another, a caregiver reflects on the concept of “death with dignity”: When her time comes, she tells Reibel, “I don’t want to have a lot of tubes and Band-Aids and black-and-blue marks. I want it to be a peaceful death.”
In recording such stories, Reibel helps people speak openly and for posterity about their feelings at a time of peril. He sees this work as a way to put into action the humanistic philosophy and tradition of public service that he first learned at Amherst, from pre-med adviser Richard Aronson ’69. Underlying that ethos, Reibel says, is a quest to “create conditions under which all people have the full equal opportunity to thrive in body, mind and spirit.”
After each interview, Reibel gives his subject a recording to keep as an heirloom.
For those willing to share their stories with a wider audience, he’s created three- to five-minute YouTube clips. “I pulled out the best anecdotes that I thought would be useful to other people,” he says. One key message is that patients handle serious illness differently—whether through humor, through anger or with a mix of emotions.
As for his own health scare, Reibel never thought he would die from testicular cancer—its survival rate is 99 percent if caught early. But he says that having to urgently reconfigure his routines to incorporate mentally and physically taxing therapies made him reevaluate aspects of his life. For him, a big lesson was realizing how much solace he takes from nature.
Reibel hopes the recordings and videos will be meaningful to patients and their families, as well as to strangers. He knows that having listened to these stories will make him a better doctor, too.
Eric Goldscheider, an Amherst-based writer, is a frequent contributor to the Beyond Campus section.
