While we can contribute to the lives of others at a distance, the sort of service that is mutual is usually handmade, something that happens in a deeply personal way between two people. At such times, we may come to know the true value and worth of our lives. The kind of service which changes our lives is rarely accomplished by simply signing a check. The service that transforms us the most has our fingerprints on it.

At the age of forty-five, George had patented a part of a medical invention. For more than two decades since, he was the CEO of a small but successful company that manufactures and distributes these parts worldwide. George was a fine businessman and a shrewd investor, a highly sophisticated man who travelled widely and collected many beautiful things. By most standards, he had led an enviable life.

Six months before he first came to my office, George had discovered that he colon cancer. His cancer was widely metastatic at the time that it was found and his physicians had told him that he did not have long. He told me this during his first visit to my office.

My offices are not traditional. Elegantly and tastefully dressed, he seemed unfazed to find himself on houseboat. The cat loved him immediately and he held her on his lap as we spoke, unmindful of the potential for damage to his Armani suit. I loved him immediately too.

His diagnosis had shaken George badly. I had expected that he would be depressed about the hopelessness of his situation but this was not the case. There was a lot else on his mind. "I have wasted my life, Rachel," he told me flatly. "I have two ex-wives and five children. I support all of them but I don't know any of them. I never took the time to know them or anyone else. I have spent my life doing business, building my company from an idea in my basement to what it is today. I do not think they will miss me. I've nothing behind me but a lot of money. He looked away and shook his head. "What an old fool," he said. "A stupid old fool."

The thing that George invented and that his company manufactures is a part of a medical device that has enabled people whose chronic disease was previously unmanageable to live almost normally. Another of my patients uses this device. It has changed her life. Before it was available, she had been severely limited by her disease and almost housebound. Controlling her physical symptoms had occupied most of her time. She had been unable to work, unable to have any sort of normal life among people.

Soon after she was fitted with this device she had gotten a job for the first time. There she had met people, and begun to have friends. In time she had met and married a fine man, and had a child. "The day they gave me this device, I was reborn," she had told me. And so she was.

It is a breach of privacy to give one patient's name to another but I thought that perhaps Stephanie might be willing to write an anonymous note about her experience and I could give it to George. I resolved to ask her if she might be willing to do this.

When she discovered I knew the man whose invention had made her device possible, Stephanie was speechless. She sat thinking over my request that she write to him to tell him about the difference his work had made in her life. Shyly she asked me if I thought he might be willing to come to her home for dinner, so that she could show him the life he had made possible for her. I said that I would ask.

George was surprised that I knew a patient who used his invention. He was very touched that she might want to meet him and readily agreed. He offered to take her and her husband to dinner at one of our most elegant and expensive restaurants. "I don't think so," I told him. And so, an evening was found and George went to dinner at Jane's home.

The week after this dinner he sat in my office shaking his head in wonder. He had expected to have dinner with this young couple, but when he had arrived, George was welcomed by Jane's whole family. Her mother was there, her three brothers and sisters, several of her aunts and uncles and a crowd of nieces, nephews and cousins. Her husband's parents were there too, and many of her friends and neighbors-the whole community of people who had sustained her in the years she was an invalid. They had decorated the little house with crepe paper and everyone had cooked. It was an extraordinary meal and a wonderful celebration.

"But that was not the important part, Rachel," George told me. "They had really come to tell me a story; they had each played a part in it and had a different side of it to share. It took them over 3 hours to tell it. It was the story of Jane's life. I cried most of the time. And at the very end, Jane came to me and said, 'This is really a story about you, George. We thought you needed to know.' And I did. I did."