This three-part series is inspired by training in June 2023 as an end-of-life (EOL) doula with Henry Fersko-Weiss. Henry is a key pioneer of the modern death doula movement, with more than 20 years experience not only serving hundreds of people at their deathbeds, but also training thousands of people in EOL doula work, contributing significantly to revival and definition of the death doula role itself.

While I occasionally refer to EOL doula work as a touchstone, my focus is rather upon a quality Henry emphasised as crucial: presence. Whether owing to my current profession as a classroom teacher, to overall interests in philosophy, psychology, pedagogy, or the various other vocations, contemplative traditions and practices which I’ve also explored, my own fascination with presence is indeed founded upon very simple though sometimes epiphanous personal experience– experience that’s immediate, social and in person. Most purely and often, it’s through eye contact.

Even as an introduction to these posts, therefore, that’s where I’d love to start– with looking you in the eye, and you looking in mine.

Literally.

(And literarily.)

Because first literally, and at least metaphorically, whether at the deathbed or elsewhere– sharing presence means to look each other in the eye.

***

Dilation

My earliest memory of existential awareness of death was itself an experience of eye contact: with my dad when I was twelve. It was our first interaction after the passing earlier that day of my grandpa, his dad. The cycle of life, of generations, of fathers and sons, all flashed between us in a good-night glance into my bedroom.

Just days ago, reading our very first chapter book out loud together, I asked my own four-year-old son why he thought its near last chapter was called ‘Last Day’. At first, I was taken aback by how direct and immediate his answer was. “Maybe because Charlotte is going to die,” he answered. My pride swelled at his precocious narrative processing, his prescient anticipation and sober interpretation– leaving me notably less present than him to the effect building as he listened. After I read the start of our chapter’s last paragraph, “She never moved again”, he interrupted to guess precisely what was made explicit in the very next sentence. “Is Charlotte really dying?!” he asked, looking me hard in the eye. I nodded grimly, and my son’s betrayed look broke my heart in a way I’ve barely experienced thus far as a parent. His sobbing grew to seem inconsolable. “I don’t want Charlotte to die!”

Charlotte’s Web is fiction, but this is the power of story, of metaphor, of imagination. Of course the boundary with reality is especially blurry for a four-year-old, our enthusiastic but naive choice of chapter-book leaving us as parents full of doubt and guilt, our son’s grief unmistakably real. Bereavement educator Alan D. Wolfelt, whose companioning approach emphasises shared presence strongly, says, “To look into the eyes of someone mourning the death of someone precious is to look into the window of the soul.” Most of us learned this old saying applied less specifically, to anytime ever looking a person in the eye. For all its probing search into someone, yet also its open, receptive admission of another into oneself, such eye contact is the foundational experience of presence as shared.

Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, had recently won the Nobel Peace Prize, but otherwise I knew absolutely nothing about him. Wandering early into the large, open square outside the main temple on the first morning of his annual Monlam teachings, where so many were seated for opening ceremonies the day before, I was confused to see so few people, just standing around in small, casual groups. Trying to make sense of where attendees were gathered, I suddenly noticed a gate swing open on the side opposite the temple where an entourage began streaming out. It was the Dalai Lama, leaving what I later would learn was his residence, recognisable to me only in being accompanied by a retinue of obvious bodyguards and other monks, the first carrying a smouldering pot of spicy incense, held aloft like a lantern. I stopped to watch, fascinated especially by the reverent reaction of Tibetans scattered here and there throughout the square. The Dalai Lama was slowing the group’s pace, his purpose seeming driven by nothing more than genuine amusement, warmth and curiosity for those who happened to be present. Approaching close by, he was beaming this way and that, nodding and smiling to those he clearly recognized– until, with a quizzical look, he stopped– and turned to look straight at me.

I’ve never, not before or since, experienced such eye contact in my life.

In that suspended moment, he swallowed me whole. I felt utterly naked. It felt like he saw right through me, like he saw everything about me. Yet his illuminating gaze was without glare. Despite seeming to dilate access of me deeper than my own awareness, his disarming penetration was also itself disarmed. He felt entirely without judgement. Despite my most intimate self feeling helplessly exposed to him, I didn’t feel the slightest bit violated, insecure, embarrassed, or ashamed. I entered him, too. And his pupils were bottomless.

Although I recognized the experience as remarkable even at the time, I only reflected on its full significance some years later, realising the desire sparked in me by that moment to understand what was in this man’s presence– what was behind those eyes. I returned back and forth to McLeod Ganj, spending more than a year there over numerous visits; I studied and practised Buddhism, both with the Tibetans in India and as a student of comparative religion and philosophy at universities back home; I practised ironic introversions of that eye contact in thousands of hours of eyes closed in the dark, in silent meditation. Somewhere along the way, I even discovered that there is a pedagogical tactic within the Tantric tradition of a teacher giving such lightning-strike (dorjé/vajra) eye contact, said exactly to entice or remind the student of past-life connection to the path. Craving repetition of that initial experience, I often reentered the presence of the Dalai Lama himself, many times– but never experienced again this unmistakable eye contact. Lately, I’ve returned to appreciating that, despite undoubted influence by all the exploration it inspired, the initial experience itself deserves foremost respect as profound and powerful– simply for the shared presence of that eye contact.

No doubt like most of us, I’ve had many affecting moments of sustained eye contact: with newborn infants, for example (not only my own son); with a cow (in India, no less). Even across species, certainly across cultures, across languages– eye contact proves a most indispensable bridge for authentic connection. Intentional, immediate eye contact is a quantum feedback loop of presence– a precise reciprocation of sentient beings present and giving presence to one another. Despite its impossibility, at least without further context, of communicating complex ideas, intentional and immediate eye contact is the elemental grounding of all presence as shared– the formative touchstone of all communication in general.

“When Eyes Touch” is an academic article by James Laing that I highly recommend to anyone interested in philosophical analysis of eye contact.  He begins by summarising the ways that eye contact is central to interpersonal connection, noting that even the etymology of the word ‘respect’ suggests the primal etiquette of sharing presence to be grounded in eye contact– ‘re-’, to return; ‘spect’, look; he gathers sources suggesting it as fundamental to both human evolution and development, “play[ing] a significant role in our pre-reflective understanding of ethical life”. Laing’s introduction also notes how socially challenging it can be: “Prolonged episodes of eye contact usually occur during episodes of heightened emotional and physical arousal, especially during episodes of mutual intimacy or aggression. The avoidance of eye contact, moreover, plays a salient role in the phenomenology of shame, guilt, and humiliation.” Walking through the surprisingly unsatisfying extant philosophical treatment of the subject, Laing offers illuminating refinement, describing the way a person’s intentional gaze imparts pressure and accountability upon another; how it necessitates a return of that gaze, thereby putting each party into self-aware sharing of presence that transforms the emotional attunement of both. He concludes by calling eye contact a “mutual transaction”:

[W]hat the other is doing to me and what I am thereby undergoing are not understood as two constitutively independent events. Instead, they are to be understood as two aspects of an ontologically basic interpersonal transaction. There is phenomenological motivation for this; we cannot fully describe these ways in which I am being affected by the other’s gaze independently of my consciousness of the way the other’s gaze is acting upon me. In this respect, the experience of being looked at is analogous to the experience of being touched.

Even as suggested by this comparison to literal touch, eye contact is not the only way that presence may be shared, of course. Sound, too– perhaps for its often ‘cool medium’ invitation of imagination as complement– or for its resonance as literal vibration, as sensation, and therefore potentially quite tactile itself– is a powerful medium for presence. A baby’s heartbeat inside their mother; a voice call; musicians jamming together; etc. Through people who’ve woken from comas or heavy anaesthetic to report clear details of what was said by others, we know that anyone at bedside must respect, even when a patient appears dependably unconscious, that anything might be heard, and I love Henry Fersko-Weiss’s advice that, even if unresponsive, a dying person should be spoken to directly. However, I find even more revealing Henry’s emphasis that one get to eye level, perhaps crouching low at the bedside. Muttered, half-conscious messages may be caught, certainly can be meaningful; the briefest flicker of eyelids into eye contact, however, might reveal a deeply understood knowing by itself, and certainly a return to lucid presence shared. With due respect to the visually impaired, the autistic, etc, as well as in general sensitivity to myriad other complications that prevent literal eye contact that I look forward to considering in Part Three, eye contact deserves privilege as a literal ideal– and as a foundational metaphor– of shared presence.

My enthusiasm for Laing’s work extends to his methodological orientation, which leans explicitly on literature, etymology, and especially metaphor. He emphasises that eye ‘contact’ already is metaphoric, since indeed, the word’s etymology– ‘con-’, with or together (along with the synonymous ‘com-’, long my favourite prefixes); ‘tact’, related to physical touch– suggests a root meaning that is literally tactile. He expresses caution about the “risk of being misled” by common visual metaphors such as ‘eyes as the windows of the soul’ specifically, and by ‘visuocentrism’ more generally (the unexamined tendency, even in philosophical discourse, to prejudice knowing as seeing). But Laing’s respect for not only linguistic but even literary meaning is unreserved in his attention to Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, and Oedipus Rex, and his article’s title itself returns to and re-invigorates that metaphorical meaning of ‘eye contact’  by paraphrasing it anew. Despite his dutiful academic scepticism, Laing’s own premise is that such metaphors be taken seriously: “They play a powerful, often unacknowledged, role in our thought, and they are so familiar that we often use them without realising that we are deploying metaphors”. While I wholeheartedly appreciate the phenomenological correction in Laing’s wariness of ‘blind’ visuocentrism, how can so many metaphorical associations regarding eyes and sight be without ‘insight’? As it turns out, eye contact is like actual touch– in remarkably nuanced ways. And why is it powerful for a person to feel ‘seen’? Why do both Henry Fersko-Weiss and Alan Wolfelt emphasise the power of ‘bearing witness’? Never mind that polysemous usage of such words and phrases extends beyond casual metaphor and into legitimately literal, dictionary definitions: whether imaginatively, intuitively or etymologically, how ‘mere’ should eye and sight metaphors– perhaps any metaphors– be taken to be?

My son became so distraught by his experience of Charlotte’s death, he began crying out for his mama. But my own best relief of his choke-sobs came when I insisted on his full presence, likewise giving him my own. I got down to his level, eye to eye. As an equal– empathetic, without judgement– I held mere space. “Sweetheart, I don’t want Charlotte to die, either. And I’m so, so sorry.” As his eyes became searching again, finding mine, his crying transformed into deep sighs, and then silence. While not at all to suggest that through eye contact, my son’s understanding of death or trust of his parents had suddenly become uncomplicated or relieved forever, he felt, at least for a crucial moment, seen. Certainly, my words also resonated with specific meaning that mere eye contact cannot communicate alone. My being fully present, however, as an earnest witness to his grief, was the grounding that finally subdued his overwhelmed realization of loss, its pain feeling shared.

The ‘eyes as windows of the soul’ adage used by Wolfelt is indeed a metaphor atrophied into the kind of outright cliché that Laing invites us to examine. Its continuing currency seems to capture our intuitive experience with no less validity than when it first appeared in English some 400 years ago; richly figurative, it also captures meaning like only metaphors can. Similar to eyes, windows sometimes are shut. Curtains, drawn. Windows can be frosted, boarded up, dirty, or broken. But to re-animate the old wisdom’s imagery fully is perhaps especially to appreciate its clear suggestion of “mutual transaction”: like windows, eyes can be looked through both from inside to outside and from outside to inside, thereby affecting one another during the exchange itself. When open, the metaphor suggests– when eyes are seen through with full presence– they can reveal, in both directions, the most inside of all– the soul. Many may stay skeptical of this final element of the metaphor’s vehicle, ‘soul’, having any verifiable referent, but metaphysical, metaphorical or otherwise– psyche? consciousness? conscience? presence?– our exploration should dignify both it and its embodied, tangible form of availability ‘regardless’.

Eye contact demands presence, and thereby opens and disarms it. Immediately– ie, without lag time, but also without mediation– it dilates between feelings, beliefs, affects, consciousnesses, presences, thereby exposing, affecting and compounding them. The liminal rim of the pupil draws, pulls, sucks into blurred self-other boundaries. It is magnetic, a delicate vacuum of more presence, which reciprocates and further concentrates. Visuocentrism requires the phenomenological correction of full sensual context recommended by Laing, and indeed, the tactile metaphor of eye ‘contact’ reveals as much about the literal centrality of touch to human connection as it does about metaphors or eyes. Eye contact’s promiscuous penetration into someone, but also its submissively open, receptive admission of another into oneself, suggests explicitly sexual, intimately tactile metaphor. Eye contact itself serves as a central metaphor for shared presence, only and exactly because of the possibility of presence being shared via other mean(ing)s. In every other ‘sense’, however– the equation between eye contact and shared presence is literal.

I therefore hope here to catch your eye, too. Perhaps like literal eye contact, this hope can become awkward for my very attention to it; fantastical, clumsy, even entirely insufficient, for the mere metaphor of it. But if words themselves might all be metaphors for connection, seeking to satisfy ‘like’ and until the immediacy of literal eye contact– may words, story, imagination span rather than expand that gap in the meantime.