I once read in one of Paul Theroux’s books of travel that he never visits graveyards. I really enjoy Paul Theroux,  but I actually enjoy graveyards, too. Even though I don’t have any on my bucket list, in the course of one’s meanderings,  they sometimes do appear. For example…If, like us, you are in an adventurous mood and find yourself on Old Las Vegas Highway, which leaves Santa Fe and heads southeast, just take it to the very end.  You will come to Nuestra Senora de la Luz, an old church on the National Register of Historic Places.  It’s called Canoncito Church by the locals.  To me, it’s simply the Church at the End of the Road.  

The gravestones are so different here.  There is mystery to them but also a quaintness that old graveyards acquire. It also has a look of not being completely abandoned , as if some remaining family member occasionally attends to it. The Church at the End of the Road.  And so, I give myself over to these places filled with sometimes long, and sometimes sadly short histories, of which you know little other than the names and the dates of “born” and “died”.

And so  we stayed for a while.  I read the names on the headstones.  As always, my mind wandered with questions about the lives of the names on these headstones.  Were there family members who once stood around this same spot?  Were these dead loved and did they love?  Or did they live troublesome lives, wrought with illness and ill fates?  And in the end, did they realize the inconceivable chance  of having once been here at all, and the gift and preciousness of our short lives?