I like to think I know a little something about something, but until I was planning this trip (which was supposed to be very different than it turned out, thanks to life… or death, I suppose), I’d never heard of the weeping angels. The first was originally sculpted by William Wetmore Story and rests over the grave of his wife, Emelyn, but one of its most beautiful replicas is this one, at the Chapman H. Hyams memorial in Metairie Cemetery. As many times as I’ve been here to New Orleans, I’d never visited Metairie or known of the Weeping Angel there. Everything in its time, as they say.

Here’s the thing. This angel does not wish to be found. 😂 I’d planned to drive to Metairie, photograph the Weeping Angel, roam around a bit, and make my way to wherever came next. Best laid plans, right? 🙄

Metairie Cemetery is a former horse racing track turned sprawling labyrinth of graves, and aside from the street names, there is not a single informative… anything. You either know exactly where you’re going there, or.. Godspeed, traveler. I did not know where I was going. 🤣

So, I drove around Metairie pretty aimlessly for the first hour or so, figuring my statue would turn up eventually. But remember how I said she doesn’t want to be found? One does not simply stumble across the Weeping Angel. 👌🏽😂 So after a few concentric trips around the track and with the sun starting to dip, it was time to get a lot more deliberate.

I grabbed my phone to read back through all of the very well-intentioned, but not particularly helpful directions the interwebz had to offer: “She’s the third grave on the right when you come in!” (Spoiler alert: there are ZERO graves on the right when you come in.) But I did see a Google Maps entry for her, with a very oddly placed marker off all of the mapped roads, and figured I didn’t have any better ideas, so off I went.

Well, thank goodness for an off-road capable vehicle, because downpours in the few days before Christmas had destroyed everything that wasn’t paved. I inched my way down a narrow, tree-draped and mud-covered path until I heard “You have arrived”… at an empty grass field next to the highway. BUH. I circled through one more time, keeping my head on a swivel. Just before I “arrived” again, I looked to the left and saw a tiny sliver of blue in my peripheral vision. I threw the car into reverse for a better look, hoping anybody even attempting this road would have the good sense to do it slowly.

Even directly next to the mausoleum, I couldn’t see a name, a door, or what was inside – just the blue stained glass window that’d caught my attention in the first place, which looked almost identical to others throughout the cemetery from the outside. Time to explore. I got out, hopscotching over mud puddles and waterlogged sod, and circled the building until I found an entryway, the ONLY one I’d seen all day that faced AWAY from passersby. HYAMS, it was inscribed across the top, and I was relieved, excited, and anxious all at once… until I walked up to reach for the door and saw a wanderer’s worst enemy: a padlock and chain. 😫

I should have known that after all this it wasn’t going to be that easy.

Undeterred though, I tested the slack on the chain. Not nearly enough for me to slip into, by a long shot. But definitely enough for me to slip my left hand through with a (no pun intended) death grip on my phone, because I definitely knew that after all this, it’d be just my luck to drop my primary means of communication into someone’s grave. 😒 I took a bunch of awkward, slightly painful shots—as the best ones are—and flipped back through to inspect. HATED THEM. The light wasn’t right, the angles were all different, and standing over her, even from 6 feet away in my forced social distancing didn’t feel right. So I sat down.

I whispered a few words to her and her charges while I was there. I grieved with her, this physical representation of the weight in my chest. I took my pictures, and then left her to get lost in Metairie and the world again.

“Why did she bother to record any of this?,” you might be wondering. Because I was the only one there, and one day, all of these little details will melt into just a vague recollection, and I can’t help but think everything that led me to her only makes the photograph mean even more. 💙

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where i wandered: