Statue memorializes lost husband

It was barely 8 degrees Friday in St. Joseph’s Cemetery. The cold seemed to emanate from the ground, making it difficult to even stand. But Sue Greenfelder wasn’t going anywhere.

She had waited six months for this day, waited for a 4,600-pound angel to grace this site, the burial ground of Greenfelder’s husband, Chris. Now tethered to the groaning arm of a small crane, the angel hovered overhead.

“It’s beautiful,” the Spokane Valley woman said, peering through a camera viewfinder. Chris Greenfelder would have been impressed.

The granite statue roughly the size of two washing machines was a scaled-down favorite of his. The original depicted a marble-veined angel collapsed over the grave marker of a fallen woman in Rome. It was simply titled “Angel of Grief.” Once Chris saw a picture of it, he never forgot it.

“We’ve never been to Italy. He was reading the newspaper, a story about forgotten art, I think, and he said, ‘Now this is a beautiful statue,’ ” Sue said. “It was years ago. Traveling in the U.S., we would visit certain cemeteries, the one in Notre Dame, looking for it. It just stayed in our hearts.”

Chris Greenfelder died in a work-related accident at age 48 last May. For roughly the cost of a compact car, his wife contacted Genesis Granite and had the statue sculpted. The actual crafting took place in India. Six months and a long boat ride after it was commissioned, the angel arrived in Spokane Valley last week.

The original “Angel of Grief” wept for Emelyn Story in the Cimitero Acattolico, or protestant cemetery. Emelyn was the wife of William Wetmore Story, an American artist living in Italy at the time the statue was created in 1895. Theirs was a story of mature love, the hard edges – like beach glass – worn away over 50 years.

Of Emelyn, William told friend and author Henry James, “She was my life, my joy, my stay and help in all things.”

Emelyn died Jan. 7, 1895. For his wife, William had already started chiseling a marble angel brought to her knees by the weight of mourning. Her ethereal wings brush the ground. Her torso is draped across Emelyn’s grave marker as if the seraph has lost all will to fly. It marks William’s grave also. He lived just seven months after Emelyn died.

Replicas of the grieving angel began sprouting up within five years of the Storys’ deaths. Jane Stanford commissioned a marble likeness at Stanford University in honor of her brother, and another followed after the San Francisco earthquake damaged the first in 1906. There’s one shaded in the blue, stained-glass glow of art collector Chapman H. Hyams’ mausoleum in New Orleans. Those are the two most photographed and published in art books, but there are dozens more. The statue speaks to people.

Visiting St. Joseph’s Cemetery, Sue Greenfelder saw people she thought would relate to the angel, as well. Some were husbands or wives, like herself, who arrived religiously to clear the snow from a spouse’s marker and maybe change the flowers or just say a few words. Some were teenage girls staring with pale disbelief at the gravesite of a friend. Others were parents with the look of someone who has lost a child.

They might not speak to one another except to offer directions to the building where the vases are kept, but survivors crossing paths in a burial ground always communicate.

“It has opened my eyes to the cemetery and the other people in the cemetery,” Sue Greenfelder said. “I hope they’ll go there and have this established relationship with the statue.”