The Glance

What makes us human?  According to the ancients it is intelligence, it is reason.  I seriously questioned this when I was in a mental hospital caring for a sick friend.  Everything that surrounded us was unhuman – white walls, padded cells, blank expressions, doctors talking past rather than to devastated family members.  The most human moment for me was when a stranger and I exchanged a glance.  He walked his broken mother down the hall past where I sat.  My eyes raw from crying met his.  Somehow there was healing for me in that moment – in that connection.  We two shared a loss, a betrayal, a hopelessness that few others knew.

Are we less human when we are without reason?  This seemed to be what the walls of the hospital told us.  The mentally ill and those like me grieving and confused on the sidelines were certainly acting apart from reason.  The white walls seemed to tell us that we didn’t even deserve the human decency of color.  What held me fast to my own humanity in that terrible place was a glance.   If the eyes are the window to the soul then our souls reminded each other in that shared look that we were more than cold reason and that we were not alone.

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