The oldest grave in this cemetery dates from 1862. It belongs to the wife of a clergyman. She must have made the long trek west from New England along the Santa Fe Trail and was only 47 when she died. Her name was Catharine Gorman, and that is all we know about her. I found her untended grave filled with high grass, and made this image of it with a 24mm lens, catching the softly illuminated strands of grass as they flow diagonally across the headstone and then out to the opposite corner of the frame. The delicately glowing strands of grass juxtapose a symbol of life against the eroding stony icon of death. With this contrast of opposites, I express a metaphor for the cycle of life and death itself.

(Three and a half years after first posting this picture, I received an email from Ty Coup of Lawrence, Kansas. He had stumbled upon my image, and he sent me a link to a digitized copy of the 1913-1914 edition of Old Santa Fe Magazine, which featured the life story of Samuel Gorman, one of New Mexico’s first Protestant missionaries. In 1842, Gorman married Catherine A. Turner, a school-teacher in Granville, Ohio. That same year, he was ordained a Baptist minister, and ten years later became a missionary to New Mexico to Christianize Indians. After spending ten harrowing and heroic years in Laguna and Santa Fe, his wife Catherine Turner Gorman died of a brief illness on February 19, 1862. Gorman went on to remarry twice, and after a long and colorful career as a missionary, he died in Dayton, Ohio in 1907. Gorman’s first wife Catherine rests below this stone in a grave nearly lost among the weeds of Santa Fe’s Fairview Cemetery.)

(Further information on Catharine Gorman has been kindly provided by Betty Danielson, historian of the Baptist Convention of New Mexico. She has researched the Gorman family and compiled their life story. She tells me that Catherine had three sons and a daughter. She also told me that her husband had her tombstone freighted by commercial wagon across the prairies to Santa Fe. Betty and her husband have written a full biography of the Gormans, but it has not yet been published.)