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On her side of the thick pane of glass, Meg Eggleston could hardly breathe.

Yet, she concentrated on the moment: smiling and keeping eye contact with the man strapped to a gurney on the other side.

"If there was ever a place where there wasn't God, it was in that room," Eggleston recalled of the tiny space, not much bigger than a walk-in closet, for the group of people waiting there Nov. 18, 2005. "I know that's not true, but it was awful."

Divine intervention, the Greensboro woman was sure, had brought her into the bowels of Raleigh's Central Prison, where Elias Hanna Syriani was about to lose his life. The gesture that got her here would also become the linchpin of a family's journey to forgiveness.

Once, anti-death penalty protests on street corners got little more than a passing notice.

"I'd never spent any time thinking about (the death penalty), except saying it's not right," said Eggleston, 61, in a warm Southern drawl.

But that was before she became pen pals with Syriani in 2001, much as the nun and the death-row inmate had in the celebrated book "Dead Man Walking." Eggleston, who had been invited to a gathering of People of Faith Against the Death Penalty, wanted to do something as an individual. She began writing to Syriani, not knowing much about his crime but believing no one is beyond forgiveness. Jesus, she believed, wouldn't have turned his back on a person like Syriani.

"It's a classic example of following our faith, and because it's faith we don't know where it's leading," said the Rev. Frank Dew, pastor at New Creation Community Presbyterian Church and the Greensboro leader of People of Faith Against the Death Penalty. "If we did, it wouldn't be faith. It was a journey Meg began, and Meg followed, to the very end."

* * *

In the opening frames of "Love Lived on Death Row," grainy video of the giggling Syriani children at play is superimposed over their father's execution order. It's a sobering contrast.

The documentary, screened in film festivals and churches across the country, tells the story of the family - immigrants from Jordan, living in Charlotte and raising a brood of four. But on July 28, 1990, Elias Syriani cornered his wife, Teresa, in her car. She had asserted her independence by finding a job and dressing in more American fashion. He stabbed her repeatedly as their youngest, 10-year-old John, sat next to her.

The parents had been separated. Teresa Yousef Syriani, 12 years younger than her husband, had taken out a restraining order, fearing domestic violence.

He wanted to reclaim his role as head of the family. She wanted a divorce.

"The father we knew was a man who put his pride ahead of anyone or anything," said Sarah Barbari, one of the older siblings, who now lives in California. "He believed that conforming to American culture was the devil trying to ruin all that he had worked towards preserving."

After Syriani was convicted of the murder of his wife, the children moved to Chicago, forging a strong bond with each other and consciously writing him out of their lives.

On death row, Syriani would face a lonely existence.

* * *

The first thing the former school teacher wanted this pen pal to know was that she was not looking to romance a death-row inmate.

Not that she even knew what he looked like.

"I put up red flags - I wanted him to know that I was married and a grandma," Eggleston said of the first letter, sent in the fall of 2001.

She got Syriani's name from the death-row pen pal of another woman in their faith group.

"It was a 'God thing' that it was Elias," said Che Hooks, Eggleston's daughter. "It wasn't like she picked him."

When Syriani wrote back, he spoke liberally of his Christian faith, of asking God for forgiveness for his mistakes.

He wanted to know about the son she mentioned at West Point. About Bonnie, the terrier who chased chipmunks even in the rain. About her grandchild on the way. He told her colorful stories about his children when they were younger. How he was considered a better-than-average pingpong player before coming to the States. Of his traumatic upbringing in a harsh and abusive household. That he was a low-level diabetic.

"He was hungry for that outside connection," Eggleston said.

Hooks wasn't surprised to find out what her mother had done. She recalled as a young girl helping her mother deliver Thanksgiving meals to the needy. Hooks said the family's compassion was passed down from Eggleston's mother. Eggleston remembered the arrival of a Jewish boy in her school.

"When I was in fifth grade I remember her telling me, 'There's going to be a new kid getting on the bus, and they're going to talk about him and I don't want you to,'" Eggleston said of the boy. "The whole point of it was just because he is of a different faith doesn't mean it's OK to treat him badly."

Eggleston decided to pay Syriani a visit that December. When she got there, she found a short, 64-year-old dressed in the red jumpsuit of a condemned man - with deep eyes and what she describes as a "Ricky Ricardo" smile."He did a terrible despicable thing," Eggleston said of Syriani. "But he was also a man forgiven."

He told her he was guilty.

"We didn't talk about it a lot," Eggleston said, "until he got an execution date."

* * *

Over the next three years, the conversations between the pen pals helped Syriani break down emotional walls - including the controlling attitudes about family that he had carried over from his childhood.

"Elias listened to Meg because he respected her and her opinions and guidance," said Linda Booker of Pittsboro, the documentary's producer. "He was very remorseful, but he needed someone to guide him through the process."

After living with confusion and hate for more than a decade, Syriani's children had decided by the summer of 2004 that they wanted to see him. They arrived at the prison in August to confront the man who had taken away their mother.

"They didn't know they would fall in love with him," Eggleston said.

From behind a glass partition, he shared stories about their childhood that nobody else could, such as the beach trip when he had to sleep in the car with the dog because it wouldn't stop barking.

The siblings found a profoundly different man. His attitudes toward women were especially notable; he even told the girls not to marry a man who did not respect them.

"The changed man we were sitting across from did not only experience God's work but had actually been touched by an angel," Barbari said.

That angel, she said, was Meg Eggleston.

"Some people might say their friendship began by mere coincidence," said Barbari, Syriani's daughter. "She was in his life to teach him something."

The reconciliation included the siblings' visit to Gov. Mike Easley, whom they asked to commute their father's sentence.

They stated their case on "Larry King Live" and "Good Morning America" - anywhere they could draw attention to the case.

"It was an execution that nobody wanted," Eggleston said. "You don't get the person back because the person who caused the death is taken away."

Easley eventually turned them down.

* * *

Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh is where death penalty protesters hold interfaith prayer services before executions, including Syriani's.

"It was a really strange day," said Eggleston, who was to speak during the service.

Syriani's children were finally going to hug their father, to sit with him without the glass.

Expectations were high, though, that the governor would wait until the last minute but stop the execution. As Eggleston prepared to speak, word came that the governor had said no.

"We had really gotten caught up in the possibility that there would be some mercy ... because of the children," said Hooks, who had gone with her mom and stepfather to the prison.

When the time drew near the Syriani children left the prison grounds, as their father requested.

He had asked Eggleston and her husband, Don, to stay.

"I would have never thought it would go where it went, with my witnessing an execution," Eggleston said.

She left when Syriani, 67, closed his eyes for the last time.

"Maybe it was something ... that fed something in me," Eggleston said of her contact with Syriani. "I didn't just lose a project; I lost a friend."

Eggleston traveled to California four months later for the birth of Barbari's baby.

"She sends birthday cards to multiple people on death row - she has a list," Hooks said of her mom's effort to continue to provide human contact with others there. "But to have that kind of intimate relationship again would be too hard."

Syriani seemed to recognize that in a statement released by the prison after his death.

He wrote, in the sometimes-broken dialect to which Eggleston had grown accustomed: "... I want to thank all the beautiful friends who share with me my sufferings for 15 years and four months and they so encouraged me, specifically Mr. and Mrs. Meg Eggleston who become a sister to me...."

Contact Nancy McLaughlin at 373-7049 or nancy.mclaughlin@news-record.com