DALLAS -- Tim Boss had long heard of the weeping angel. He'd first seen her image at the shop where he builds picture frames and had been looking for her ever since.

Then one day, taking pictures at Grove Hill Cemetery, there she was.

"Oh, my God!" he remembers saying.

He hands you a picture across the table where you're having coffee together. You breathe in quickly because she looks so real.

She kneels at the marble monument of the person who was born in 1872 and lived for 49 years. One arm of this angel is bent under her head; the other is outstretched.

"Somebody placed -- the first time -- a rose in her hand, and it was just incredible," says Tim, 48. "The last time, somebody had replaced it with an artificial flower. She has such graceful wings. She's just beautiful."

Tim began taking photographs in cemeteries about three years ago, after buying his first digital camera. He's not sure why. Though it was just after both his parents had died, within 11 months of each other, he doesn't sense any significance.

"Even when we lived in Germany, we'd always hang out in cemeteries," says Tim, who spent eight years of his childhood overseas and returns to Germany almost every year. "They were real calm and quiet."

He passes more photos across the table. You talk. He mentions the void he feels now that his parents are gone.

"I wonder if I'm searching for calmness, for serenity," he says.

"When I do see angels that are sorrowful or mournful -- not all of them are; some look forever to the sky -- you sense someone has passed on, as if, 'I'll stay and watch over.' It gives me a lot of comfort."

And so he keeps going back on Wednesdays and Sundays, his days off, twice, maybe three times a month. He's surrounded by silence, by serenity, by statues that comfort and bring peace.

"To me, a cemetery is like a sculpture garden," Tim says. "It's a park, not a place to be afraid or to be spooked or anything. ... There are these wonderful, beautiful statues out there, protecting everybody, everything."

Though Tim photographs other subjects, and other statues, in cemeteries, he is particularly drawn to the angels.

"Is there a spiritual aspect to all this? Yes and no," he says. "I've always believed, whether you call it intuition or angels, that something's out there, telling you, 'Don't do this.' It could be that guardian angel.

"Angels do exist. I'm always amazed at these statues. Sometimes I'll be looking at them and think, if they could just open their eyes ... "

He knows the exact location of every angel he has photographed in the cemeteries he frequents. Years of seeing them in all kinds of light, in all sorts of weather, have made him feel close to these marble beings, and to those whose final resting places they guard.

When he comes home after his hours in the cemetery, he always feels good, he says, his thoughts sorted through.

"I'm very respectful," he says. "I try to be thankful somebody thought about leaving something like this for me to look at."

http://www.southbendtribune.com/stories/2004/12/30/faith.20041230-sbt-MICH-D2-Photos_capture_soul_.sto