The Angel of
Death
23 1/2" tall, 18" wide, 11" deep
"The Angel of Death is so quick as to register only for the briefest moment on the eye, a moment so slight as to make her invisible in normal time. At some point between the last thought, and the final still of the body is that instant when she exists, her time of life-becoming-death, which is the greatest mystery of the universe. Religion and science draw power in the search of its absolute secrets, but no construct of man has proven so divine as to offer the least explanation. In that unknown passage, the soul is most vulnerable -- and she arrives without fail, the faithful servant of the divine within us, a compassionate and soothing being, bringing release from grief and pain.
After falling on the ice, I had a vision of her in my sickbed -- the all-too-familiar cracks in the ceiling became frames of a motion picture where imagination caught her presence -- fine visions of that beautiful, elemental lady, and the swirlings of those dark robes. A strangely enthralling fabric with each fold swirling into the next, deeper, deeper still, sweeping passage into the web of time and space -- endless, welling motion like a restless sky pulling shadows from the earth, dark, darker, and darkest still -- the fabric of death. And within those robes are her wing's black, rustling motions, crackling through the swirl of silken, ghostly calm -- agents of action on a precipice of void.
Of all the angels, she endures the most. The pain of the world's passing is hers, yet she seems so frail, so gaunt -- the toll on her, for someone so sensitive and caring, must be enormous, yet, to fail at her job even once would be a staggering, unthinkable cost.
As she is the portal between two worlds, when the coin of these realms is flipped, could there be another side -- but if we pass from our mortality to bliss why is there no sign? Death is resolute in giving no answers.
Silent with her mysteries, she stands caught in my mind's eye in an impossible second. The child, dying, trusting of her, embraced, but in that embrace is movement...her hand is leaving the angel's finger tips, her body is folding into the robes of death, the restless curls of soft black -- the fabric that has such sad hunger."
Lisa Lichtenfels