The original Angel of Grief stands in the Cimitero Acattolico (Non-Catholic Cemetery) in Rome's Testaccio neighborhood, near the ancient Pyramid of Cestius. The cemetery — also called the Protestant Cemetery — is the resting place of many notable figures, including the poets John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. It was created in 1894 by William Wetmore Story, an American sculptor, poet, and former lawyer who had spent most of his adult life in Rome. Funerary art had included winged figures for centuries — guardians watching over the dead, hands clasped in prayer, gazes lifted toward heaven. These traditional angels represented innocence, immortality, and the connection between the earthly and divine. Story's angel broke that convention entirely. Instead of standing upright and looking skyward, her wings hang limp. Her face is hidden. Her body drapes over the tomb in a posture that has no dignity left to maintain — only raw, unfiltered sorrow. The angel of grief speaks to something universal: the weight of loss and the way love endures past it.
Special to United Methodist Insight | September 23, 2026
It is not easy to leave this world. There are so many things that call us back: the people we love, our unfinished work, unfulfilled dreams, a comfortable old chair, a house filled with memories, the smell of freshly baked bread. What could heaven offer that is better?
Someone once said to me, after watching his father suffer greatly before he died, that he had come to believe that his father’s suffering, as excruciating as it was for him and for their family to watch, had served a purpose. It made his father ready and glad to leave this world with all its pains and sorrows - and it helped his family to let him go, knowing he would have no more pain.
Still, we let our loved ones go reluctantly, fearing they are lost to us forever, wondering how we can live without them. Our hearts ache for years and years. We are tempted to despair, we feel sorry for ourselves, we are angry at God for taking them - and at everybody else going on with their lives as if nothing has happened.
It's not fair, we want to scream. This is not what we signed up for. When we said "till death do us part," we thought it would never happen. When we gave birth to our little ones, we thought we could protect them from everything! Death can hurt us deeply - and it can frighten us like nothing else.
The sculptor William Wetmore Story captures the desolation we experience upon the death of a loved one in his Angel of Grief monument. The original marble sculpture sits in Rome's Protestant Cemetery, marking a grave that is more than 130 years old.
When his wife Emelyn died in 1994, the loss so consumed Story that he abandoned his studio entirely. His children convinced him to return to sculpting and create a monument for their mother’s grave.
The sculpture he produced — formally titled "The Angel of Grief Weeping Over the Dismantled Altar of Life" became his final masterpiece. Story himself described it in words that capture both the artwork and the grief behind it: the angel represents utter abandonment, throwing herself with drooping wings and hidden face over a funeral altar. He said it represented what he felt — prostration.
Where traditional cemetery angel statues comfort visitors by suggesting the deceased is at peace, the Angel of Grief does the opposite. She puts the viewer's own grief on display. She says, "This is what it looks like when love loses the person it belongs to." And in doing so, she gives mourners permission to feel exactly what they feel — not the composed acceptance that Victorian society expected, but the messy, floor-level devastation that grief actually is.
The figure of an angel collapsed over a funeral altar, wings drooping, face buried in her arms, speaks to something universal: the weight of loss and the way love endures past it. (from Memorials.Com https://www.memorials.com/info/grief-support-guide/angel-of-grief).
The Apostle Paul speaks of this in his letter to the church at Thessalonica, to a congregation full of sorrow, anger, and doubt. Paul had told them of Jesus' resurrection, the victory over sin and death. He had promised that Christ would come again soon, and that they would all rise with him.
Now their loved ones were dying, and Christ had not yet come. What were they to think? What if there was no heaven?
Paul says to them the same thing he would say to us in our grief today: “Let me tell you about those who have died. You do not need to grieve as others do who have no hope. You know Jesus who died and rose again.” (Thessalonians 4:13-14)
Paul goes on to give a graphic, convoluted explanation with archangels and trumpets, but this is all he really needed to say: Jesus was dead. Jesus is alive!
Those of us who know Jesus know better. We die as he died and we are raised as he was raised. If Jesus is alive, then we are alive with him always. There is a new sheriff in town. Everything has changed since Jesus came. He has given us a new understanding of reality, a new perspective on what has always been true about the nature of human existence. There is no death!
The Thessalonians might have said to Paul, "Well, that's easy for you to say. It's our loved ones who are dying." And Paul might have told them about a vision he had of heaven, a revelation he later described in a letter to the Corinthians.
Paul said, "I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven-whether in body or out of the body I do not know; God knows. And I know that such a person-whether in body or out of body I do not know; God knows-was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told." (2 Corinthians 12:2-4)
Paul invites us to open our spirit's eye to an unseen world (unseen by most of us) that is more real than this one we can see, touch, taste, smell, and hear.
Ginny Rivers, a resident of Florida, describes what she saw and felt in heaven in a near-death experience: “There was total peace… I was no longer frightened. I was comfortable and content to be where I was. No fear… no pain… just peace and comfort and amazingly undaunted curiosity…” “I could not see God as I see you, but I knew it was Him. A Light, a beauty emitting from within, infinitely in all directions… The harmony of coloration, design and melody originated here with the Light. It was God, his love, his light, his very essence, the force of creation emanating to the ends of all eternity… reaching out as a pulsing beacon of love to bring me home.”
The Rev. John Sumwalt is a retired pastor and the author of “Shining Moments: Visions of the Holy in Ordinary Lives.” Email him.