There is nothing so healing to oneself as to heal another.
THE LETTER
IWAS BACK INUTAH,AT a book signing in a northern Utah shopping mall, when I noticed a woman across the mall staring at me. After a few moments she approached, hovering near my table as if afraid to speak to me. I spoke first.
“Would you like a book?”
She shook her head. “I’ve already read your book.” Then she added, “You’re not old enough.”
“To be a writer?” I asked.
“To have experienced this story. The story isn’t true.”
“No, ma’am. It’s mostly fiction.”
“I wanted it to be true,” she said softly. “I wanted a place to go. I wanted to lay a flower at the angel.” Then she walked away.
The depth of the woman’s sadness had a powerful impact on me. For the next few days the memory of her haunted me. I shared the experience with one of the salespeople at my book distributor.
“We get calls like that all the time,” he said. “People are always trying to find the angel. They wander through the Salt Lake City Cemetery looking for it. A lot of them say they’ve lost a child.”
•
I called Leah Perry, the elderly woman who had told me about the angel, and asked if she would take me to see it. We drove up to the southwest end of the cemetery and began combing the area she had run through nearly seventy years before. This was not easy for her, as she now hobbled along with a cane. We couldn’t find the angel. After searching for nearly an hour, Leah raised her hands in frustration. Then, hitting a granite headstone with her wooden cane, she exclaimed, “It was right here by Mr. Bean!”
Leah called me the next day. “I phoned the cemetery,” she said. “They said there was flooding in that part of the cemetery and some of the headstones were lost.”
The angel was gone. As I thought of the grieving parents wandering the cemetery looking for it, I suddenly had the desire to rebuild the angel—to provide a place for them to grieve their little ones. When I told my mother of my desire, she began to cry.
“Sue was never buried,” she said. “I have no place to go.”
•
Dear Mr. Evans,
I have just completed your book. Thank you so much for writing it. I bought your book in December but I got carried away with the bustle of the holidays and didn’t get a chance to read it.
I didn’t know it at the time but I was pregnant. We found out in early January. My husband and I were so excited. We felt so blessed. Our whole lives immediately revolved around this baby coming.
At fourteen weeks I had a miscarriage. It was the saddest and worst experience of our lives. The moment at the ultrasound when they said there was no heartbeat we were devastated.
Since there was no tangible way to mourn our loss—no grave to go to, no ceremony to take place—peace is hard to find. I felt left without resolution and just a lot of questions.
Your book has brought me some solace. I just want to thank you. Thank God I bought your book. I find it strange that I had it for so long and didn’t read it. I guess it was waiting for me. I did send flowers to the Christmas Box Angel. That has also given me a sense of peace. Thank you for that and for helping me to heal.
Truly,
Karyn
I decided to have the angel in place before Christmas, less than three months away. I asked a neighbor of mine, a funeral director named Rob Larkin, if he knew where I could find an angel sculpture. I figured that morticians must have catalogues of premade statuary. Instead Rob asked me if I knew of a sculptor named Ortho Fairbanks.
“I don’t think I could afford an original sculpture.”
“You could never afford Ortho,” Rob said, “but his son, Jared, is also a sculptor. He might be willing to do something.”
I phoned Jared and told him my idea. He was interested, but insisted that I call his father.
“I can’t afford your father,” I said.
“You need to talk to him,” he repeated.
The next day I met with Ortho Fairbanks and his wife, Myrna, in the front room of their home. The Fairbankses did not live far from me and I soon realized that I had met Ortho before. He had been one of the convention delegates who supported me when I ran for the state legislature.
As I explained the purpose of the angel, the sculptor’s eyes began to tear up. He left the room, then returned with the bronze plaque he had made for their own child’s headstone. Hyrum Ortho had died eighteen hours after his birth. The plaque was a duplicate of the one that was mounted on their child’s headstone nearly three thousand miles away in Laie, Hawaii. They too had no place to go to mourn their child.
Myrna spoke for both of them. “Don’t worry about the cost or the deadline. Whatever it takes to build this will be done.”
•
I felt strongly that the new statue, like the original, was to be placed in the Salt Lake City Cemetery. I called the cemetery and explained my intentions to the sexton’s secretary. She asked that I send a written request. I sent a letter, including with it a copy of The Christmas Box. The next time we spoke she was excited about the prospect of the angel statue. She had read the book and understood the need for the angel. She too had lost a child.
“You’ll have to meet with Mr. Byron, the sexton,” she said. “He’s out of town for the week. If you can call back next Thursday, I’ll arrange a meeting.”
The following Thursday I called her back.
“There’s a problem, Richard,” she said.
“What’s wrong?”
“You’ll just have to talk to Mr. Byron. He’s available to meet with you tomorrow.”
From the tone of her voice I knew that my request had been denied.
The next day, as I drove up to the cemetery, I contemplated my anticipated rejection and wondered if an appeal was possible. For the first time I began to wonder if the angel would ever stand in the cemetery. Then I said out loud, “How will I even know where it should be?” Suddenly there came to my mind a strong impression: The place has been chosen. Doubt quickly replaced the impression. They’re not even going to let me build it, I thought.
The impression came again: The place has been chosen.
•
The sexton’s secretary greeted me, then introduced me to the sexton, who was mulling through paperwork at a cluttered desk. He glanced up. “Just a minute,” he said, returning to his work. Paul Byron had worked at the Salt Lake City Cemetery for fifteen years. He knew the place like his own backyard. It was, in fact, his own backyard, for he lived in the house on the property.
He glanced up. “I’ve heard your request, Mr. Evans, and I’m going to have to deny it.”
Despite the secretary’s warning, his response still came as a surprise.
“May I ask why?”
He sat back in his chair. “I get a lot of requests like yours and I just can’t do it. In the first place this would have to be approved by a half dozen city organizations, including the city council, probably even the mayor. The red tape is considerable. It couldn’t possibly be done by this fall, even if I had the time to go to that much trouble, which, frankly, I don’t. Besides, there’s no place to put a monument. This cemetery is almost a hundred and fifty years old. The plots are all privately owned. We just don’t have the space. I’m sorry.”
Then the sexton returned to his paperwork. I just sat there, my mind reeling. I thought I had received inspiration. Not knowing what to do, I did nothing. After a few minutes the sexton looked back up, probably wondering why I was still in his office. “What is it that you’re really
trying to do, Mr. Evans?” he asked.
I looked down for a moment, then back into his eyes. “I just want to build a place where people can go to be healed.”
•
I may never fully understand what happened next. The sexton’s countenance suddenly changed. He stood up, walked over to a map on the wall, then, with a pen, made anX near the center of the cemetery. “Here,” he said. “We could put it here.”
We drove up to the site—a beautiful knoll that overlooked the city.
The sexton walked to the crest of the small hill and extended his arms outward, like angel wings. “It will go right here.” He looked around. “You’ll need more than one plot, though. You’ll need at least five. I could write an ordinance that would restrict other grave markers on this hill.”
He looked at me thoughtfully. “It’s the strangest thing. There’s been a utility shed on this property for the last forty years. A few months ago it was torn down. I was supposed to sell the land, I even had buyers, but for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to do it.” He suddenly turned to me, seemingly as surprised at what he was saying as I was. “People will come from all over the world to see this angel.”
As we drove back to the office he said, “I get a lot of requests for this sort of thing and I have always turned them down. I don’t know why, but this angel of yours is supposed to be here.”
I drove him back to his office. His secretary followed me out to my car.
“What did he say?”
“He’s going to allow it. In fact, he’s going to request that the city donate the land.”
She looked at me incredulously. “Paul said that?”
I nodded.
“It’s a miracle,” she said.
•
We set the date of the angel’s dedication for December 6, the day of Andrea’s death in The Christmas Box. I’m often asked why I chose the sixth. No reason, really. I suppose it’s just what came to mind.
Ortho and Jared Fairbanks worked long days, often late into the night, to meet the nearly impossible deadline. They delivered the completed sculpture to the bronze foundry only a few weeks before the dedication ceremony. When Ortho went to the foundry to check on the sculpture’s progress he was asked by one of the foundry workers if there was something mystical about the angel.
“There are strange things happening with it,” he said. “It’s come together in a fraction of the time it should have, and several of our workers say they’ve had unexplainable feelings while working on it. We’ve begun to call it ‘the miracle angel.’ ”
I planned to pay for the bronze casting with profits from my book. In the meantime I had a lot of books to sell.
