The Angel of Grief Revisited

Each time I visit Green‑Wood, I come across something new or rediscover an old favorite. That was the case yesterday when I found myself once again before Green‑Wood’s Angel of Grief.

This monument is one of several replicas of William Wetmore Story’s dramatic sculpture which stands in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery, where Story and his wife Emelyn are buried. Henry James once called the original “unsurpassed, in all his work, for intensity of expression,” and it’s easy to see why. Additional versions of the monument appear in New Orleans’ Metairie Cemetery, in Hingham, Massachusetts, and in scattered corners of Texas, California, New Jersey, and Canada.

Formally titled The Angel of Grief Weeping Over the Dismantled Altar of Life, the sculpture was Story’s final major work—a raw, unguarded expression of his devotion to Emelyn. He described it as “the angel of grief, in utter abandonment, throwing herself with drooping wings and hidden face over a funeral altar.”

Green‑Wood’s version marks the grave of the Cassard family, and it carries the emotional impact of Story’s original: a figure collapsed by sorrow, wings slackened, grief captured in stone. It's a reminder that mourning, in every century, has its own language—and sometimes that language echoes across continents.