Such a deep, dark, silent blue. I stared
as far into her eyes as I could, hoping to sense some glimmer of understanding,
some hint of awareness. The deeper I dove, the darker became the blue,
until the blue became the black of some bottomless lake. “Mrs.
Browning, do you want to die?...do you want to die?”—
I near shouted as I continued to peer into her pools of strikingly
beautiful but incognizant blue. It felt so eerie. Her eyes were wide
open and crystal clear, but instead of the warmth of lucidity, they
burned with the ice of expressionlessness.
With this meeting, attorney George J. Felos
became the legal advocate of Estelle Browning’s right to die
and in the process plumbed the depths of death and dying and spearheaded
a social revolution to enable death with dignity in the state of
Florida. Felos uses this case and a decade-long tax battle with
the United States Justice Department—sending him to Hong Kong’s
back alleys in search of antique jades and ivories—as framework
to interweave the story of his law practice and spiritual unfoldment. If the seemingly barren and war-strewn
field of litigation can be the playground where spirit dances, it
can revel anywhere. |
