Johanna Willett's favorite stories of 2015

Standing on a flatbed trailer, the sprawling grasslands of the Sonoita-Elgin area all around him, the Rev. Steve Lindsey preaches his “Resurrection Day” sermon.

Canelo Cowboy Church’s band plays bluegrass hymns as the sun rises, and the smell of breakfast cooking — biscuits, gravy, eggs and bacon — drifts toward churchgoers.

In the coming year, the congregation hopes to relocate here permanently, leaving behind the one-room schoolhouse where the church has met since its first service in 2006.

This is a day of new beginnings.

“Our first-ever service was a sunrise service on Easter,” says the pastor’s wife, Naomi Lindsey, 53. “We had 80 people in the middle of nowhere at 5:30 in the morning.”

RUBBING SHOULDERS

After that first Easter service, attendance averaged around 30 to 35 people each week. These days, 75 to 80 churchgoers pack into the one-room schoolhouse, with some Sundays seeing as many as 100 worshippers. At the beginning of this year, the church added a second service each Sunday morning.

“Once you get to 80 percent capacity, folks just don’t want to rub shoulders,” Steve, 56, says. The church seats about 72, and until the two-service split, it wasn’t uncommon to find people standing in the back.

These cowboys are onto something.

“There is so much of a need out here, so many cowboys, ranchers and rural people who need a church where they can come as they are,” Naomi says. “They can chore and muck and come here with muck on their boots, and it’s OK.”

Many show up to church in boots and jeans. The early service is most popular, with people coming straight from their morning chores.

Before church starts, Steve hangs his cowboy hat on one of several horseshoe hooks by the door. Other hats soon join his after someone rings a hand bell to summon the congregation inside for service.

They will miss this place.

ONE-ROOM SCHOOLHOUSE

Joy Bergh’s 12-year-old daughter, Sophia, wants to be married at the schoolhouse someday, and Bergh’s newborn daughter Maryanna was in church for her first Sunday.

Sophia and her 9-year-old brother, Oskar, run beneath a large oak tree that shades the church, and Joy cradles their sister, chatting with church members who coo over the new baby.

“The kids go out there and play on the rope swing,” Bergh, 39, says. The family has been attending the church for four years after moving from Tucson to the Elgin area. “If you’re used to Tucson and the heat and the gravel backyards, you get out here and there is this gorgeous tree with shade and a rope swing, and the kids just loved it.”

The schoolhouse-turned-church was built around 1912. Steve Lindsey’s grandmother attended school there the first year it was open, as did his father and uncles in later years. Lindsey says the school closed in the 1940s and sat vacant and vandalized for years on the edge of the family’s property.

“The man that owned this homestead here had dedicated 2ƒ acres to the school board for the school, and then my dad and uncle bought the building in the mid 1990s,” he says. They fixed it up and started hosting community meetings there.

And then Lindsey heard the call of God.

“I was born and raised on a ranch, and my family have been cowboys forever, and I felt there was a need to reach this demographic of people,” he adds. “Jesus said to go into all the world to preach the gospel to every creature, and I just didn’t feel there was enough being done for the working cowboy.”

CALLED TO PREACH

Before Canelo Cowboy Church, Lindsey started an energy management business in Tucson, following his previous career at Sulphur Springs Valley Electric Cooperative, Inc., in Benson.

Naomi Lindsey says her husband always felt called to preach. He was ordained by the Southern Baptist Convention in 2006 and has taken seminary classes. Canelo Cowboy Church is his first experience as a pastor.

Skyline Baptist Church in Benson backed the startup. The Southern Baptist Convention’s North American Mission Board vetted Lindsey and then provided funding for the church for the first five years.

“They subtract 20 percent of that funding every year,” Lindsey says. “It gives you the burn.”

Even before becoming completely self-sufficient, Canelo Cowboy Church started Rincon Valley Cowboy Church in Tucson. For four years, Lindsey pastored both churches, preaching at Rincon Valley on Saturday nights and at Canelo on Sunday mornings. The church has also helped to plant Sierra Vista Cowboy Church in Hereford, Mustang Mountain Cowboy Church in Whetstone and River of Faith Cowboy Church in Benson.

These days, Lindsey preaches only at Canelo and focuses on the looming building project. One of his sons now manages most of the work on the family’s ranch.

Two of his nine adult children attend the church. Young families make up a large part of the congregation, Lindsey says.

“We’ve got a whole lot of babies and a whole lot of old folks and not a lot of teens or singles,” he says.

RANCH FAMILY FUN DAYS

This month, Canelo Cowboy Church plans to host its first Ranch Family Fun Day in the arena built on the new property. Usually, the church invites the community to the fairgrounds in Sonoita for activities such as goat tying, barrel racing and roping.

One Sunday each month for 10 months out of the year, the church swaps Sunday service for the family fun day, which includes music, preaching and food for whoever shows up — usually around 200 people.

Roland Cowan, a deacon and worship leader, has been part of Canelo Cowboy Church since the beginning. “I have a granddaughter out of the deal,” Cowan, 63, jokes. His daughter married the Lindseys’ son.

The Ranch Family Fun Days make a cowboy church different from a country church, he says. The church does its primary community outreach this way, attracting families who live miles away.

Glen and Joan Riddels first discovered the congregation when cousins invited them to a fun day. They fell in love with the church.

“We had been in Arizona for quite a long time, and we hadn’t found a church yet and just knew we needed to be in one but never felt at home,” Joan, 53, says. “You need to feel loved, and then we found this church.”

The couple lives in Whetstone and commutes almost an hour each Sunday for church. Glen, 49, was raised on a farm, and the Riddels own several horses — but he says a cowboy church isn’t about livestock or land.

“You don’t have to have cows. You don’t have to have horses and all of those things,” says Glen, who is training to become a deacon. “The idea is to go there and learn about God and worship and fellowship and those types of things, and then you have to get back to your chores.”

Jim Ballard is a cowboy- church planting catalyst for the North American Mission Board’s western region and has worked with Lindsey. The Idaho-based missionary says he did a survey of cowboy churches several years ago and found that roughly 17 percent of attendees are ranchers or “real cowboys.”

“We have people coming who have never been on a horse or wouldn’t know what to do with cattle or livestock,” Ballard says. “They love the simplicity and the straight-up message.”

THE PEOPLE, NOT THE BUILDING

At Canelo, anyone is welcome — cowboy or not.

“We try to gear our services and everything we do to the working cowboy, but the wannabes and the John Wayne-like people who just want to dress the part can just come and feel comfortable, too,” Lindsey says.

Hitch Paprocki owns a landscaping business in Picture Rocks and says this is the most comfortable he has ever felt in church. Paprocki, 61, rides his motorcycle about 100 miles to get to church each Sunday. He loves the ride, the destination and the catching up that happens between friends after church. “You could hang around here forever,” he says.

Paprocki, like others, is sad to leave the charming schoolhouse.

But it is time.

The schoolhouse has no cell- phone reception and no running water. The church office functions out of the Lindseys’ home one-quarter of a mile away. The gravel surrounding the church and the steps to the door make accessibility difficult for elderly churchgoers. Several years ago, the church built a small building out back for the children’s ministry.

“It will be good to move, but I kind of like this one,” says Joan Riddels. She and Glen have attended for about six years. “But, it’s not the building, it’s the people. As long as everybody goes there, we’ll be good.”

The church is fundraising for its new 60-by-40 foot multipurpose building and is going through the permitting process. The 17.32-acre property is about 10 miles closer to Sonoita and has room for an arena. Money is tight, but Lindsey has faith in his God, in his church and in these people who have become his family.

“They took me as I was, praise the Lord, and they had faith in me, more than I had myself,” he says.

The church has owned its new property since about 2008 and has watched the Easter sunrise there for years. With a year of building construction ahead, this year, perhaps more than the others, brings new life for this church.

But then, Lindsey’s work at his church has long been about life change.

“Seeing people and friends come to the Lord and then knowing them B.C. and A.D. and seeing their lives changed and being part of that, that is something you just can’t explain away,” he says. “I would do what I’m doing come hell or high water.”

Standing on the east tower of Mission San Xavier del Bac, Bob Vint’s fingers graze the cracking plaster.

If Vint, the architect for the mission’s restoration, has anything to say about it, this tower will finally get its due after being an unintentional afterthought for so many years.

“We are gearing up to tackle the last, structural refinishing of the east tower,” Vint says. This project will strip the tower of its cement exterior, repair the original low-fire clay bricks and refinish it with traditional materials.

Vint recommended removing the problematic concrete layer from the mission to the nonprofit Patronato San Xavier in 1989. When the restoration of the east tower is finally complete, the cement added in the 1950s will no longer suffocate any part of the mission.

“The east tower will complete the liberation of San Xavier of cement, because it has been encased for more than half of a century,” Vint says. They have been removing the stuff since the 1990s.

Since 1978, nonprofit Patronato San Xavier has overseen the preservation of and fundraising for the mission, also called the White Dove of the Desert.

Through a $3 million capital campaign for east tower restoration, the nonprofit intends to complete its removal of the cement layer smothering the mission. The campaign launched quietly in 2013 and has so far raised $800,000. Now, the public phase will begin.

Funding for work on the mission’s east tower is also included in the bond proposal approved by the Pima County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday. Falling under Natural Area Conservation and Historic Preservation, mission restoration would receive $2.5 million, a sum Patronato San Xavier must match over a 10-year period, says Barbara Peck, a board member of the nonprofit and the co-chair of the $3  million capital campaign. Any excess money would go toward additional mission restoration, if voters select that package in the fall.

They are fundraising now so restoration of the east tower can proceed even if the mission does not receive any bond money.

“We started doing all of that with the roof and the walls and the sanctuary, and we just somehow continued to miss the east tower,” says Chuck Albanese, the president of Patronato San Xavier and former dean of the University of Arizona’s College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture. “Something else was always a priority, but right now, having recognized the condition of it, the deterioration is accelerating, and it may be more urgent than we actually realize.”

That’s because no one really knows about the condition of the bricks beneath the cement, says contractor Daniel Morales. His family has worked on mission restoration for generations.

The original builders never finished the east bell tower. It has no dome, and for about 120 years many of its bricks lacked a protective plaster.

“The original intention was for this to have a dome and lantern, but they never finished and left the exposed brick,” Vint says. “There are myths about why it is not finished.”

But it’s actually quite simple, he adds. The builders ran out of money.

Around 2009, with the completion of the restoration of the west tower, history repeated itself.

“When we completed the west tower, we had anticipated to get started right away” on the east tower, Peck says. “We had state Heritage Fund money, and that was before the economy started to decline, and the state swept that back into the general fund.”

The west tower project cost about $2.5 million and took about six years to restore, Vint says. He guesses that the east tower will be in worse condition structurally, but it does not have the dome or architectural flourishes that made restoration of the other tower so painstaking.

Morales and his crew have already begun reinforcing the tower’s foundation, but they do not want to build scaffolding until they know they have funding to finish. Morales estimates that the restoration will take five years. With the exception of a few tools, everything is done by hand. It’s slow work.

“In addition to the fact that the work takes a while, is that Danny can’t hire 10 guys when he doesn’t have the budget,” Vint says. “He has a budget for four guys, so that also affects the pace of the work.”

When builders in the 1950s applied the layer of cement plaster to the mission, they smothered the bricks, creating an environment for moisture and mold to cause structural damage. The cement must be removed and repairs made with a mortar made of lime, sand and a prickly pear glue — all compatible with the original construction. A plaster made of the same materials finishes the project, allowing the bricks to “breathe.”

The cement was meant to protect the brick, Vint says. “As it turned out, the cement was incompatible with the original construction and caused unforeseen deterioration, which now we’re getting to see as chunks of the cement fall off, and we’re getting to see the brick is all eaten away by trapped moisture.”

Loose and falling chunks of concrete on the east tower have forced Morales’ crew to do some preventative maintenance, removing loose cement and applying a lime-mortar wash.

“Lime is a lost art, pretty much,” Morales says. “It’s a material that does not set like cement. Concrete starts to hydrate the minute you start adding water, but lime will not. If you don’t do it properly, it will fail on you.”

And they are determined to do this right.

“When you’ve got old stuff, you’ve got to take care of it,” Vint says.

Other future projects for the mission include a restoration of the front facade and work on the mortuary chapel and walls surrounding the graveyard. With the building “open to the climate,” interior artwork will always be in need of preservation, Peck says.

“You’d always like to think that a beautiful piece of art is never finished, and that is the case in the design and construction of San Xavier,” Albanese says. An old building built with basic resources “will always need restoration and conservation.”

But for now, the east tower, with its missing dome and weathered bricks, will finally get the limelight.

Toby Van Skike never forgot the nurse who hustled him to safety as warning sirens screeched through the 71st Evacuation Hospital in the Pleiku area during the Vietnam War.

First Lt. Frances Cappadocia, a 20-something registered nurse, helped the wounded, 19-year-old soldier crawl under his bed with his mattress wrapped around him. The bedding, along with crates full of dirt, provided additional protection during rocket attacks.

For almost 50 years, Van Skike remembered Cappadocia, one of the nurses who cared for him in Vietnam. He always planned to find her someday.

In January, he did.

•••

Cappadocia, now 71, joined the U.S. Army as a registered nurse in 1967 — the same year Van Skike volunteered for service.

She chose to serve in Pleiku, in a hotly contested and strategically important area.

“She was there during the height of the war,” says Sue Pennington, Cappadocia’s partner. “I never knew what that was like for her at all because she never would talk about it.”

Of her three years of service in the U.S. Army, Cappadocia spent one year in Vietnam. She would go on to serve 22 years in the U.S. Air Force as a nurse practitioner. She retired in Tucson as a lieutenant colonel, and took a job as a nurse practitioner with the Arizona Department of Corrections at the maximum security prison in Florence.

The stress of that job triggered what Pennington, a clinical nurse specialist in mental health who worked at several Veterans Affairs hospitals, always knew lurked beneath Cappadocia’s competent exterior. The women met around 1969 while earning their bachelor’s degrees in nursing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

“I worked at the VA for 32 years,” says Pennington, 74. “I know what post-traumatic stress disorder is, and I knew Fran had it, but she would never talk about it, ever.”

Cappadocia agreed to go to therapy only if Pennington would accompany her. There, Pennington learned about late-night panic attacks and nightmares of bodies with bugs in the eyes.

“Fran is so stoic,” Pennington says. “I never knew she would wake up in the middle of the night feeling panic attacks, feeling like she was going to die.”

Therapy also helped her overcome the shame tied to her time in Vietnam.

“She was one of those people who, when the plane landed, people screamed at them, ‘Baby killer! Baby killer!’ and threw tomatoes,” Pennington says. Therapy “helped her go from being ashamed to being very proud.”

Still, war left its mark. About four years ago, Pennington began to see a change. Then, after a bad fall about two years ago, Cappadocia’s care coordinator at the VA recommended that she move somewhere such as the Arizona State Veteran Home-Tucson.

“It was the worst day of my life to do that,” Pennington says.

Cappadocia no longer walks or speaks, though Pennington still sees flashes of recognition in eye contact and hand squeezes.

Doctors have diagnosed Cappadocia with a severe case of post-traumatic stress disorder and Alzheimer’s disease, Pennington says.

Dr. Priti Sinha, a psychiatrist who works with Cappadocia at the Southern Arizona VA Health Care System, says that while the two conditions are distinct and unrelated, their symptoms may overlap in the beginning. Both can inhibit daily life as they progress.

•••

After a series of law enforcement and government jobs, mostly in California and Washington, Van Skike, 66, retired and hit the road, with long-term plans to settle in Washington. He moved to a home near Benson about 20 years ago, at the request of his aging parents.

His memories of Vietnam are still sharp — the explosion that embedded a piece of shrapnel in his knee, the doctor who failed to remove the metal and sewed him up instead, the blood poisoning and streaks of red stretching up his torso, the huddle of hospital officials whispering about his injury, the word he picked out of that hushed conversation: “amputation.”

Penicillin shots — administered by Cappadocia — saved his leg.

“I got a penicillin shot for breakfast, lunch and dinner because I was so infected,” he says.

He remembers one day when Cappadocia gave him a shave instead of a shot.

“She looked at me and said, ‘I don’t care if you are 19, you don’t need to be looking this scruffy,’” Van Skike says. “She proceeded to shave my baby face, and I winked at her.”

Van Skike admits to having a crush on the young nurse. He still has a photograph of the two of them outside the hospital.

“She was more of a friend than any of the other nurses that were there,” he says.

He spent about three weeks at the 71st Evacuation Hospital, was transferred to a Japanese hospital, and then sent back to the U.S. He completed his two years of service at Fort Carson in Colorado as a private first class, although the Army has since corrected and promoted his rank to specialist.

He didn’t stay in touch. “I never had any more contact with Fran,” he says.

•••

When Pennington got Van Skike’s first voicemail message in January, her heart dropped.

In her 44 years of living with Cappadocia, Pennington never met anyone from her partner’s time in Vietnam.

“I knew it was legitimate and something big, but I think I had a fear,” she says of that January message. “Part of me was afraid, ‘Is this someone who is going to be causing her more pain? … Or is this a cause of joy?’”

She waited several weeks to return the call. In Benson, Van Skike’s own apprehension spiked as he faced dealing with memories of war.

He had found Cappadocia’s contact information through inquiries on veteran websites. When the response came — with a Tucson address — he was shocked. For several years, he mulled over what to do. Finally, he called.

And finally, Pennington called back.

“He wanted to know how she was,” Pennington says. “I said, ‘I need to prepare you. Fran is not at all like how she was when she was there with you.’” She explained Cappadocia’s current condition. “He heard all of this and said, ‘Can I come and see her?’”

•••

When Van Skike visits Cappadocia, he cradles the delicate hands that once shaved his stubble and applied poultice to his leg.

She squeezes his hands when he tells stories about Vietnam. Sometimes, tears slip down her cheeks.

“It’s good, because I’m having to deal with it,” Van Skike says of his war memories. “I don’t like some of the stuff I’m remembering, but I have to go through it.”

Since January, Van Skike has tried to visit Cappadocia several times each month. On a recent visit in April, she was recognized at a ceremony for women veterans at the State Veteran Home. Sponsored by the American Legion, the event recognized about 20 of Arizona’s female veterans, including Cappadocia and two other residents at the Tucson facility, said its therapeutic program manager, Samuel Nanez. In June, two of Cappadocia’s uniforms are slated to go on display, encased in glass, at the State Veteran Home.

Pennington calls this recent reunion a miracle.

“Those kids were in a foreign country and being bombed every day,” Pennington says. “Their lives were being put at stake. The impact that it must have had on those two, there is that kind of connection that none of us can ever know.”

When Van Skike’s hourlong visits with his nurse draw to a close, he prays with her.

“I know that I’m disappointed in myself that I didn’t try harder, because I moved here 20 years ago,” he says. “I never forgot her but never made an effort to find her until a few years ago. She has been in Tucson since 1985. … At that time, she wasn’t in the condition that she is now.”

But still, he comes. It is his turn to care for Cappadocia.

“It was so heartwarming to see the two of them,” Pennington says. “He thanked her and told her how much she had meant to him all these years and how she saved his life.”

In the moment that a folded, American flag hovers between a member of the U.S. Armed Forces and a grieving parent, spouse or child, it symbolizes both gratitude and sacrifice.

It is a transaction honor guards perform many times throughout Southern Arizona as part of a memorial rite honoring those who have served in the military.

The hand-off is emotionally charged, with a member of the honor guard offering the standardized message of condolence to the family: “On behalf of the President of the United States, (the appropriate military branch), and a grateful Nation, please accept this flag as a symbol of our appreciation for your loved one’s honorable and faithful service.”

Everyone — stoic service members included — feels the power of that moment.

“I have passed the flag, and the first time I did it, I was in Sierra Vista and it was so humbling to me, and it meant so much to that family,” said Airman 1st Class Braulio Torres, who is stationed at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.

“It’s a way for them to find comfort in a time of grieving, and when I did it, it was about an hour and 15-minute drive back, and I couldn’t say a word because I was just so humbled by the whole experience. It’s very special. You look at the family member or next of kin in the eyes and give them the message of condolence, and they’re looking back at you, and it’s hard not to break down, but you have to keep it together. You have to be that rock for that family in that difficult time,” said Torres, who has served in the honor guard since March.

Flag Day commemorates the approval of a national flag by the Continental Congress in 1777.

Torres is one of the many who serve in the honor guards of the U.S. Armed Forces, using somber precision to fold the flag 13 times — into the shape of the tri-cornered hat worn by patriots during the American Revolution. Only the stars show.

Funeral honors vary depending on family preferences and military status of the deceased. In general, honors are due to both military members who died in service and those who “were discharged under other than dishonorable conditions,” according to the U.S. Department of Defense’s military funeral honors overview.

By law, funeral services for eligible veterans must have at least two uniformed service members present for the playing of “Taps,” the flag folding and the flag presentation, if requested. Additional honors can include a rifle detail, color guard, pallbearers, caisson and even a flyover.

Tony Parker, who has worked at Adair Funeral Homes’ Dodge Chapel as a funeral director intern for about one year, said the flags draped over caskets and presented to families usually come from a local post office. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs distributes flags to post offices and VA facilities around the country and the world.

“They are high-quality flags,” Parker said. “And they say, ‘Made in America.’”

Parker has seen an increase in services for veterans who served in more distant conflicts such as World War II or the Korean War. The appropriate branch honors the deceased. For example, an honor guard from Fort Huachuca responds for U.S. Army funerals, often doing more than one service a day, Parker said.

One recent service Parker remembers was for a Merchant Marine seaman who served during World War II. The U.S. Navy performed that service, he said, as a law requires some merchant mariners from WWII to receive military honors.

“If you had someone who was in the military a long time ago and did everything the military way, it helps the spouse and children with closure,” Parker said of military honors. “This is what it led up to. This is the country honoring Mom or our father, and it gets you. Especially if there are bagpipes, bring on the Kleenex.”

Through it all — through tears, remembrances and comforting prayers — the members of the honor guards maintain their military bearing, but not for want of compassion.

We spoke with several members of local honor guards about these powerful experiences with the American flag. Here are some of their thoughts.

Captain Zachary Knight,

U.S. Marine Corps

For about a year, Knight has worked with 10 active-duty Marines and additional reservists to provide full honor details out of the Bulk Fuel Company Alpha unit in Tucson. He tries to work with the same Marines when possible. On site, they inspect uniforms, the flag, the bugle and rifles.

“From my side, it’s a huge honor to be doing this because it’s the Marine Corps and the United States paying last respects and thanking the family and Marine for their service, so I take that as a huge honor,” Knight said. “The biggest moment is during ‘Taps.’ ... My dad was in the Navy, and that was the most powerful moment from the other side as well.”

Presenting the flag to next of kin is always harder when the service honors a young Marine who died “whether overseas in a war zone or training or off duty,” Knight said.

They do services for Southern Arizona, to Sierra Vista and down to the border. As of last week, they had done 40 funerals this year.

“Whether they are retired or got out after four years it’s impactful,” Knight said. “A lot of these guys got out of the Marine Corps as a lance corporal, so four years or less out of 60 or 70 years of life, and it shows how big of an impact (military service) had on them and their lives.”

Logistics Specialist

2nd Class

Teresa Schultz, U.S. Navy

As the full-time funeral honor coordinator for the Navy Operational Support Center in Tucson, Schultz has done her share of military funerals.

But her job also includes working with Tucson Medical Center’s hospice program to honor Navy veterans and their families with a plaque.

“Even though I am doing what I am doing, I never thought about the sacrifices people have made previously and what they went through and what their families went through,” Schultz said. “To hear them talk about it, it’s very emotional, and ... the majority of them don’t understand why we are thanking them, because for them, they were doing their job, and that’s what they were supposed to do.”

Since October 2014, Schultz’s honor guard has done roughly 150 Navy funerals throughout Southern Arizona and into New Mexico. She has been doing funerals for six years, but said, “As soon as you hear ‘Taps’ play, I don’t care how many times you have heard it, it makes your hair stand on end and you feel patriotic and proud.”

Serving this way is an honor.

“I look at my life and career and will never come close to what they have been through, so it’s not that I can relate on their level,” Schultz said.

But she can imagine. She has two sons with military experience — one recently released from the U.S. Army and another serving in the Army National Guard. Her sister is in the Air National Guard. “To know they could be put in harm’s way...” she trailed off. The thought is always there.

Airman 1st Class Braulio Torres, U.S. Air Force

When Torres joined the Air Force about two years ago, he knew he wanted to serve in an honor guard.

“I’m from New York, so the Air Force Honor Guard would always do the parades up in New York, and I would say to myself, ‘Wow, this is what the Air Force is,” he said. “I knew I wanted to be a part of it someday.”

Torres has served in the honor guard since March. Now, he is a trainer at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base teaching others the significance of serving.

“Obviously, in movies and on TV you see what a military funeral is and what a presentation of colors is,” he said. “It’s one thing to see and another thing to actually be part of it. ... It’s just humbling. It has just made me think and appreciate what it means to serve in the military, because those before us paved the way for us, and I’m just here taking the baton and hoping to pass it forward to other airmen who come after me.”

Davis-Monthan has two honor guard teams that alternate months. During their months in the honor guard, the airmen spend the day preparing for details, including funerals, in the southern and eastern regions of the state, said Tech. Sgt. Troy Agustin, who oversees the program. They have done 115 funerals since the start of 2015, he said last week.

In their off months, airmen return to their typical jobs. Torres, though, will leave the base in the fall. Until then, he will not rotate out of the honor guard, but will continue to serve there in the coming months.

“I couldn’t be happier,” he said. “It is a privilege and an honor to be able to represent the Air Force out there.”

Lisa Waite Bunker, a social media librarian for Pima County Public Library, owes much of her tech-savvy to a bit of magic.

In fact, you might even call Harry Potter her teacher.

Bunker, a devoted fan of the fantasy book series, had a growing interest in hand coding and graphic design when she discovered the online community of Potter fans.

In a “fandom” with a heavy teen presence, Bunker, now 55, watched “younger people online who were making it up as they went along,” she says. “They would do anything that would delight the fandom. They were willing to experiment, and it taught me to be somewhat fearless with trying new technologies.”

A librarian (and double for Hufflepuff’s Professor Pomona Sprout), Bunker finds that spirit of exploration handy, as her workplace grapples with the role of the library in a modern community.

No longer just a place to find books, discs or magazines, the library now deals online and in person, positioning itself as a gathering place for community creativity.

“When I think of libraries, you know, I have somewhat the same reaction as when I go into Home Depot or Michaels,” she says. “It’s walking into a place that is full of possibilities, and to some extent the possibilities are what is changing.”

Rather than just offer physical media to consume, the library can increasingly drive innovation by hosting community forums or teaching professional skills, she says.

“We will always have books,” she adds. “I don’t care what they say ... I’m sorry, they are not going away. But some of the things that we are doing are really exciting.”

Bunker believes the digital age can be a golden one for libraries — and if she has anything to say about it, it will be.

So, what exactly is a social media librarian?

Bunker primarily runs the Idea+Space and main library system Facebook accounts, while overseeing pages for other branches and programs such as the Seed Library and Bookbike.

The library also has a handful of Twitter handles and a presence on social media sites such as Pinterest, LinkedIn and Instagram. Bunker’s is the library’s prominent voice.

“You see her on those accounts,” says Jen Maney, a library service manager and Bunker’s boss. “One of her big training points for everyone doing social media for the library is using your own voice. If you show interest, you’re bound to trigger interest.”

Bunker learned in the digital wizarding world — where debates raged about characters’ romantic relationships — that promoting online community also means accepting critical comments on a public platform.

“We have freedom to create community and that may mean posting things just because they are funny, or posting things just because they are beautiful, or because you know people who love books would love seeing it,” she says. “There are an increasing number of cardholders who don’t come into our buildings anymore ... and we need to figure out how to have warm relationships with them the way we do at the desk.”

Bunker also runs the library’s monthly Catalyst Café, which she started after attending South by Southwest’s Interactive technology conference several years ago. As a way to inspire would-be entrepreneurs, nonprofits and even neighborhoods, Catalyst Café recruits local speakers to talk about technology and business. Think, Pinterest, crowdfunding and freelancing, for example.

“She saw that startup companies and entrepreneurs and makers needed some venues and guidance that they couldn’t find elsewhere, and the library was the perfect place to do that,” says Lupita Chavez, a friend of Bunker’s and a library technical associate supervisor at the Wheeler Taft Abbett Sr. Library.

The Joel D. Valdez Main Library hosts the workshops in its Idea+Space, a meeting room created to be a hub for businesses, job-seekers and nonprofits. Bunker helped the library win a $65,000 grant funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services for the space, which opened in October.

“Lisa is one of those connectors ...” Maney says. “She sees how to put people together in a way that will make us all stronger.”

What’s with this Harry Potter thing?

When the first “Harry Potter” book came out, Bunker was working as a library assistant at Sunrise Drive Elementary School.

“I had been in libraries a long time, and I had never had my desk at the library three-deep with boys,” she says. “It was amazing and kind of breathtaking for a librarian to see a book that had that kind of power for kids.”

About 2004, she discovered another enchanting world — online fan communities.

The main activity at the time was speculating about how the series would end for Harry and friends and, with a master’s degree in library science from the University of Arizona, Bunker was well-equipped to decode clues scattered throughout the other books. Unlike the teen fans who only knew to Google search, she could look up iconography, find runes in an encyclopedia or research name etymology. She also found a niche indexing J.K. Rowling interviews online by character and theme, drawing the attention of major fan sites.

In Tucson, she pulled together Potter-themed parties at the libraries, organizing a costumed cast and inviting library-goers to spend a day at Hogwarts.

“The idea was to make it as immersive as possible and really create something where they weren’t just coming to listen to music, but they had venues of being creative themselves,” she says of the events, which often corresponded with a Tucson show by the band Harry and the Potters. “We had a real quill and paper and ink so kids could us a real quill, and Snape went around handing out detention notices for goofy infractions. It was just wonderful, geeky fun.”

Bunker also worked with three other Potter devotees to put together a print version of the online fan encyclopedia, “The Harry Potter Lexicon.”

“I’m in my own library catalog, which is a kick,” she says of “The Lexicon: An Unauthorized Guide to Harry Potter Fiction and Related Materials.”

But it wasn’t all magic.

In 2007, Rowling and Warner Bros. filed a lawsuit against the small, Michigan-based publisher of the encyclopedia, citing copyright infringement. The publisher lost the case, but Steve Vander Ark, the book’s primary writer, was able to change the book to meet the court’s fair use requirements.

But the deed was done — the Harry Potter fandom expelled Bunker and the others from their community. She suddenly had more time on her hands.

“When the library said, ‘We have these social media accounts, but we’re not using them to the best extent we can,” Bunker, who was working full-time for the county system and “on loan” to the Tucson Museum of Art, decided to try her wand at it.

“At our age, people have become settled in what they’re doing,” says Brenda Huettner, a technical communicator and owner of consulting company P-N Designs Inc. “Lisa is excited and enthusiastic that there is a new process and technique and tool and gadget. She is right out there trying to understand and see how it can be useful to the community.”

What about spare time?

Bunker’s rose garden — with about 45 varieties of roses, some historic — is where she gets away from the digital world. Life as a social media librarian means she never fully escapes. Notifications silently stack up on her phone, vying for her attention.

“My husband likes me to talk to him, and my dog likes walks,” she says, laughing about her work-life blend.

People skills matter to her. She didn’t go into technology to get away from people, but rather to engage and inspire them.

Randy Hays, a jeweler, has known Bunker since their days at Sam Hughes Elementary. More recently, she encouraged him to do an exhibition at Xerocraft Hackerspace and get involved with Startup Tucson. Now he sells his Celtic and Gothic-style rings through an Etsy store online.

“She is one of those people that can’t help but instigate things and push people toward things that they are probably going to love to do,” Hays says.

During the library’s days of Harry Potter parties, Bunker took on many roles — Rita Skeeter, Dolores Umbridge and Molly Weasley. But as a host of annual garden parties, it was the Hogwarts herbology professor Pomona Sprout that stuck.

“She dressed up and was dead-on perfect ...” says Thania Mayorga-Shull, a former library employee who now works for Make Way For Books. “She definitely has a green thumb and magical ability to make all these roses bloom ... and she has a magical way of making things grow and bloom in the library world, too.”

Every morning, Nandi races into the Reid Park Zoo’s elephant barn to greet the day — and sometimes she trumpets.

“We didn’t know what a baby trumpet would sound like,” says Sue Tygielski, the zoo’s elephant manager. “It’s a little bit like a squeaky sneeze.”

It has been a year of discovery as Nandi’s eight keepers have cared for the first elephant born in Arizona.

First steps. First mud wallow. First swim.

First birthday.

On Aug. 20, 2014, Tucson celebrated its 239th birthday.

Then at 10:55 p.m., this pachyderm princess stole the show.

Elephants lined up to watch Semba give birth in an adjacent paddock. And when the baby wobbled their way, they greeted her, trunks reaching through metal railings to caress the newborn, who later weighed in at 245 pounds.

“All you could see in the light was the trunks coming through...” says elephant keeper Mara Jameson. “They were very curious about her and getting to know who she was.”

As was the rest of Tucson.

The zoo set an attendance record in 2014 with more than 617,000 visitors. The previous record of 606,884 visitors was set in 2012 when the elephants’ Expedition Tanzania opened along with two other small exhibits, said zoo education curator Vivian VanPeenen.

Nandi has also attracted out-of-state visitors.

“It just shocks us that they would come all the way to Tucson to see our baby, and then you realize how lucky you are, because these people traveled to see her,” Tygielski says.

They come because Nandi lives up to her siSwati name, which means “sweet” or “fun” in the Zulu language. Star readers, who voted for the name in September 2014, nailed it.

She’s spunky, playful and a pro mud-wallower. As of last week, Tucson’s big baby weighed 970 pounds.

In the coming year, Nandi will mature and act more like a “bigger toddler and a bigger kid,” Tygielski says. Maturity means Nandi will receive more training that allows her keepers to better care for her. For example, she is getting closer to showing the staff the back of her ears and bottom of her feet.

She has better patience these days — no more toddler tantrums.

“There are very few people in the world that get to take care of a young elephant, especially one that’s in its family unit and behaving like an elephant,” Tygielski says.

And when it comes to Nandi, “behaving like an elephant” is pretty dang cute.

Here are seven times Nandi made us go “Awwww:”

1. Meeting the family. “She met (the elephants) somewhat individually, and each one would come to her and smell her with their trunk and touch her really gently,” Tygielski says. “Mabu (her dad) is so huge compared to her, but they all stroked her and touched her, and at one point, he kept tugging her ear to pull her up. ... She would reach up to his head with her trunk ... and his trunk looks like a tree trunk, and hers looks like a little piece of spaghetti.”

2. Blowing water. “She has learned how to blow water out of her trunk,” Tygielski says. “She will suck up water and make her own little pool. She will make her own little mud wallow special for her.”

3. Braving thunder: ”She loves the monsoons because it will puddle up,” Tygielski says. “If there is scary thunder they can huddle together ... Nandi is the only one, when there is thunder, to run around, and when she sees that no one else is reacting, she sees that it’s not a big deal.”

4. Playing dress up: ”Mom puts hay and sticks on her back, and Nandi will take a bunch of hay and throw it on her head,” Tygielski says. Some days we have been coming to the barn, and we can’t see her face because she has a wig of hay.”

5. Slipping and sliding: ”Her mud wallow adventures — we were worried about her in the wallow, but she was so confident and not at all fearful,” Tygielski says. “She would trip around and fall and slip around, just getting her toddler coordination.”

6. Charging the ducks: “We have had batches of ducklings, and she is making it her personal mission to protect the herd from the ducks,” Tygielski says. “She runs up to them and stands there and is getting confident. The ducks don’t react at all. They’re so used to the animals, they don’t think she is going to do anything.”

7. Cuddling with Sundzu: “Now some of her sweetest moments are with Sundzu,” Tygielski says of Nandi’s brother. “He will often lie down on his stomach, so he is closer to her height and lets her climb on him. Punga has been doing it a little, but he also plays rough with her in the pool, but Mom comes over and splits things up and puts him on one side of the pool.”

Kathleen Sanchez will do anything for a memory.

She remembers sitting on the floor to make candied apples and helping a few of her 20 grandkids decorate Christmas stockings with glitter and glue.

“I’m all about memories; that’s all I was,” says Sanchez, 58. “I still have a lot of memories to make. As long as I have all my faculties still, I’m going to do what I can.”

Sanchez got her diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease in 2008 after an overwhelming moment of forgetfulness. For a second, she felt as if she wouldn’t recognize her own children if they drove up to her house.

But it hasn’t stopped her.

On Saturday, Nov. 7, Sanchez will speak to the crowd gathered on the University of Arizona’s Mall for the Tucson Walk to End Alzheimer’s, as she has multiple times.

Last year, her grandson Julius Hernandez III, 18, spoke on behalf of those who care for or support someone with Alzheimer’s or dementia and will speak again this year. He is working with his grandmother to spread awareness at the walk and as the founder of a new club at Toltecalli High School.

“I don’t want to accept it, but I know I have to. ...” Sanchez says. “It will always bother me until I can’t remember for it to. It will hurt until I don’t hurt anymore, and I can’t remember to hurt.”

With good weeks and bad weeks, she can feel the disease progressing. It’s scary, but her family gets her through.

“In times when I’m just like, ‘Oh, I just don’t want to do it anymore,’” she says, “my husband will say, ‘Tell your grandkids that.’”

She still finds joy in cooking for her family and teasing her grandsons who call to check in. Sometimes, they prank call.

“We still laugh a lot,” Sanchez says. “That’s one thing that hasn’t faded at all.”

CHANGING THE DEFINITION
OF HOPE, moment by moment

With no current cure, a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s is, to many families, a diagnosis of a future without hope.

For Bruce and Norma Patrick, the diagnosis of probable Alzheimer’s came in 2001, two months shy of their 40th wedding anniversary.

Bruce was a “people person” who spent 27 years working as an administrator with Tucson Unified School District, says Norma, 84.

“He always said, ‘I’m going to beat this thing,’ and I just smiled and said, ‘Yep. We sure are,’” says Norma, who immersed herself in research after the diagnosis.

In August 2004, Norma and her three adult children made the gut-wrenching decision to place Bruce in a care facility.

She smiled that day, telling her husband she would be back after a meeting.

Then she collapsed in the car, mourning.

“On the day he was placed, I realized I will never, ever face anything more difficult, no matter what life brings, than that,” she says. “It was awful.”

The family moved Bruce three times, and Norma found solace through spiritual books, prayers and quotes. She plastered the Serenity Prayer all over her home.

“‘Wisdom to know the difference’ is the key phrase,” she says. “Change what you can.”

When Bruce died in October 2007, the couple had been married 53 years. Both are brain donors for Alzheimer’s research, and Norma has volunteered with TMC facilitating its film series “Perspectives on Alzheimer’s” for seven or eight years.

“We loved him through what he had to go through,” Norma says. “I tell people, ‘I didn’t choose Alzheimer’s to study. It chose me.’ I feel like I’m helping him and honoring him.”

Terri Waldman, the director of geropsychiatric services for Tucson Medical Center, says the families that cope best with Alzheimer’s and dementia are the ones that manage to change how they define hope and establish new relationships.

“We always look at it long-term,” Waldman says. Instead, families should break it down, hour by hour, day by day.

“If you know the person is still here, you still have an opportunity with this person to have a good day, and that’s your hope,” she says. “You have to change your perspective. ... There are small successes every day.”

For the Patricks, that meant sitting on the couch and holding hands or listening to music.

CHOOSING DIGNITY

When Waldman meets someone with Alzheimer’s or dementia, she looks for the person inside, no matter the stage of the disease.

“I didn’t know who they were, but I know who they are now, and you can see their whole life in their eyes,” she says.

Alzheimer’s takes away roles — mom, wife, daughter, sister — but it does not take away the essence of the person, she says.

“What are the qualities that made your mom a good mom? She still has those qualities,” Waldman says.

Even with Alzheimer’s, Cynthia Valencia‘s mother loved to dole out compliments in the early stages of the disease.

“She was so sweet and so cute and always so friendly,” says Valencia, 45. “So with her dementia, she would want to stop you and talk to you and tell you that your shoes were cute and your eyes were pretty.”

Valencia has been a caregiver for 15 years and started the work six years before her mother, Flossie Walker, was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. Most recently, she has worked as the community-relations director at Prestige Care Inc. in Green Valley.

The diagnosis frightened Walker, 62, who had cared for her own mother-in-law through dementia.

In November 2012, Valencia’s mother was happy and cheerful, enjoying life in the facility the family selected. By January, she was in hospice, no longer communicating and had limited mobility on the left side of her body, Valencia says.

Even then, Valencia continued to see to it that her mother’s hair was done and her nails painted, giving her the care and dignity she would have done for herself.

Walker died in January 2015 at the age of 71.

“It’s sad because my kids were robbed of the grandma experience,” Valencia says of her two teens and 8-year-old. “But the experience that this gave them, going through this, I think has given them more compassion and understanding for dignity. So when you talk about the upside of it, of course I would like my mom to be swinging on her front porch, drinking lemonade and making cookies, but if something good has to come out of this, I think it’s that my kids have compassionate hearts.”

“YOU ARE STILL YOU”

A new study in “Psychological Science” explores the connection between perceived identity and morality when mental deterioration occurs. Nina Strohminger, a postdoctoral fellow at the Yale School of Management, worked with UA philosophy professor Shaun Nichols to explore how family members perceive the identity of individuals with the neurodegenerative diseases, frontotemporal dementia, Alzheimer’s disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.

The study found consistency in a person’s moral disposition — not memories, intellect or other characteristics — has the greatest impact on how others interpret the identity of that person.

“We knew that morality would be the most important factor, but we didn’t expect for memory not to matter at all,” Nichols said. The study surveyed people who lived with Alzheimer’s patients.

“The perceived identity doesn’t seem to be affected by loss of memory,” he said.

So even if Alzheimer’s robs other mental functions, the person who maintains continuity in moral character is still more likely to seem like the same person beneath the disease, finds the study, which found Alzheimer’s fell between the two other diseases in how much it impacts perceived identity.

LIVING IN THE MOMENT

Maintaining hope is no easy task when days are long, frustrations run high and grief crushes. Many families instead cling to moments of clarity.

“With my mom, we just lived in every single moment. Whatever her abilities would allow her, that’s what we did,” says Valencia, who has volunteered with the Alzheimer’s Association for three years and is an ambassador to U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva’s office.

She remembers holding her mother’s hand, painting her fingernails. Each time her mother tugged her hand away, Valencia chided her. “Mom!” she would cry. Finally, the women locked gazes.

“Cindy!” her mother declared.

“She hadn’t said my name or recognized me in months, so those moments...” Valencia says, emotion choking her voice.

With Alzheimer’s, the present moment together is all there is.

“I love working with people who have cognitive impairments because I think they are the Buddhas on Earth,” says Waldman, of TMC. “They are in the moment. They’re totally here right now.”

You might call them headstone hunters.

Or tombstone tourists.

But actually, the proper word is “taphophile” — a person who loves cemeteries.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” says Amy Urman, the president of the Pima County Genealogy Society. “When I see a tombstone, I see history.”

Urman is not alone. On websites such as Find A Grave, BillionGraves and the Arizona Gravestone Photo Project, taphophiles log thousands of photographs of headstones.

Some upload select images from personal genealogy projects, while others dump hundreds of shots onto these sites under the banner of community service.

Headstone hobbyists

Kay Ellen Fleming is a retired nurse who spends a good 40 hours a week researching family history and cruising cemeteries.

She prefers rural graveyards to the larger ones in the city, photographing “to preserve the fact that there was actually a living human being by that name who lived in that time period,” she says by phone, taking advantage of a class reunion in Wisconsin to photograph new cemeteries.

On Find A Grave, contributors can sign up to be a photo volunteer, fulfilling headstone photo request in a given ZIP code. Fleming isn’t an official photo volunteer, but she still checks in on requests near Tucson or when she travels. So far, she has uploaded about 30,000 photographs.

“I figure a lot of people can’t take the time to go into the country and walk through brush and clear it away,” says Fleming, who has been working on genealogy for about 40 years. “When I find an old cemetery that has not been photographed, I just stay there and do the whole thing.”

And when she puts those headstone images online, the information about the deceased becomes globally accessible.

“Sometimes over time, those stories and names and dates and places can get lost,” says Michelle Ercanbrack, a family historian with Ancestry.com, which acquired Find A Grave in 2013. “Even though we are more mobile as a society than we have ever been, it still takes work and planning to visit those places in person.”

Collecting clues

Standing in Holy Hope Cemetery, 3535 N. Oracle Road, Urman gestures toward a grave adorned by a statue of a woman clinging to the cross of Christ.

“This is a sea of artwork to me,” says Urman, a private investigator. “They’re not graves. They’re hints.”

Symbols on headstones often provide next steps in the research process for a genealogist.

They might indicate religious, military or Masonic associations, referring a researcher to an organization with more records on that person.

“When this person died, these symbols meant something to them,” Urman says. “You can’t understand the loss and love of the family unless you know what the symbols mean.”

Even as modern technology allows families to swap the standardized symbols of past generations for more personalized images, headstones still tell stories.

“The size, stone type and design can tell about the socioeconomic status (of the family) and era of the stone,” Ercanbrack says by phone in Provo, Utah, where Ancestry.com is headquartered.

Not set in stone

While an epitaph may be carved into stone, that doesn’t guarantee its accuracy, Urman says.

Dates and family names can be wrong, and for online contributors, this can cause some serious ire with families who find photographs and compare them to conflicting family records. Corrections abound.

Genealogists consider tombstones secondary sources that often need verification, while vital records are primary sources, says Betty Cook, a docent with the Arizona Historical Society and board member for the Southern Arizona division.

Through the Arizona Department of Health Services, the public can access death certificates from at least 50 years ago and birth certificates from at least 75 years ago. Even this information can have its flaws.

Urman estimates that about 80 percent of the information she finds on gravestones is accurate, but ignorance, deliberate lies and a delay between the death and creation of a memorial can all convolute information.

Grief may also undermine accuracy. In March, Urman lost her 31-year-old daughter. At the time, sadness crippled her memory.

“I couldn’t even remember what my daughter’s occupation was,” she says. “You understand why (headstone information) could be true and why it could be false. You don’t know that until you live through it.”

Privacy battles

Serial gravestone photographers see what they do as a way of contributing to community history.

But not everyone agrees.

Cemetery policies often prohibit photography to protect the privacy of families.

“Many cemeteries want you to have a certified letter from the next-of-kin to take a picture of the gravestone,” Fleming says. “I have been led out of cemeteries.

“That’s why I shy away from the big city ones. Many of them say you cannot even take a picture of the tombstone.”

Online, she has been told by relatives to take down photographs of family members’ headstones.

Gail Meyer Kilgore is the state coordinator of the Arizona Gravestone Photo Project and manages sister projects in eight other states. She now lives in Colorado, but 28 years in Casa Grande made her familiar with Arizona.

Tucson cemeteries, she says, don’t have a reputation of being photography-friendly. Taphophiles toting cameras do so clandestinely and at the risk of penalty for breaking cemetery rules.

Signs at the entrance of Evergreen Mortuary and Cemetery, 3015 N. Oracle Road, state management must approve any photography on the grounds.

“We just want to be respectful to everyone,” says Peter Callaghan, the assistant general manager at the cemetery. “We try to give everyone the privacy and the respect that they deserve.”

There are more than 40,000 burials at Evergreen, but even for genealogy research, permission is necessary.

“A lot of schools will come here and have school projects, and that’s fine because there is a lot of history here,” he says. “We just don’t want it abused in any way.”

Find A Grave lists 150 cemeteries in Pima County, although that number includes a few smaller cemeteries within larger parks, the defunct Alameda-Stone Cemetery and a handful with only one or two burials listed so far.

Evergreen Mortuary and Cemetery, Holy Hope Cemetery and East Lawn Palms Mortuary and Cemetery all have more than 20,000 interments listed on Find A Grave. As of Friday, at least 65 percent of the listed internments for each cemetery had been photographed.

At Evergreen, about 30,900 burials were logged so far, with 88 percent photographed.

According to headstone photographers, these virtual cemeteries preserve what weather, age and vandalism can destroy.

“The older cemeteries, they are deteriorating,” Kilgore says. “Lots of times we photograph a cemetery, and then it is vandalized and stones are broken, but we may have a picture of it in our site.”

Picnics with the dead

Many of these headstone hunters and genealogists have similar stories. Their parents took them picnicking among family tombstones, or the birth of their own children sparked a greater interest in ancestry.

Cook, with the Arizona Historical Society, remembers her father stopping at cemeteries on Sunday afternoons and pointing out the gravestones of the ancestors he knew.

Cook, like Urman, also remembers maintaining grave sites at family picnics.

“You have a little lake and sit and have a sandwich and you’re with your relatives,” Urman says of the Illinois cemetery from her childhood. “It was never a creepy experience.”

In fact, she took her own children to cemeteries so often, they long believed everyone vacationed that way.

“It wasn’t until my daughter was in about fourth grade that she found out other people went to Disneyland,” Urman says.

The creepy factor just doesn’t exist for most taphophiles — even though falling into a grave is not an unknown experience for those who haunt cemeteries.

“I haven’t been bothered by the presence of ghosts, but I have been bothered by snakes,” says Fleming, relating an experience in a Canadian cemetery when a lawnmower sent dozens of snakes slithering in her direction. She got out fast.

But usually, headstone hunters relish the time they spend in the presence of the dead, piecing together the stories of lives lost.

“A tombstone is the last photograph of a person,” Fleming says. “It’s sort of their legacy.”

A bell chimes. Candles flicker. Sunlight streams through an open roof.

In DeGrazia’s Mission in the Sun, Our Lady of Guadalupe looks on, her gaze an invitation to sit, pray and reflect.

Ettore “Ted” DeGrazia built the chapel to honor Father Eusebio Francisco Kino and dedicated it to Our Lady of Guadalupe.

“DeGrazia claims he wasn’t a church-going man, but he was a very religious man and was brought up Catholic,” says Lance Laber, the executive director of the DeGrazia Gallery in the Sun. “The image of Our Lady of Guadalupe is just very special to Catholics of the Southwest and of Mexico.”

The feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe on Dec. 12 celebrates the appearance of the Virgin Mary to Juan Diego, an indigenous peasant newly converted to Christianity. In 1531, she is believed to have appeared to him and expressed her desire for the construction of a church on Tepeyac Hill in the area of modern-day Mexico City.

In anticipation of her feast day, the DeGrazia Gallery in the Sun hosts a festival each year in her honor, this year on Sunday, Dec. 6.

Laber calls her “an icon of the Southwest.”

And for good reason. She is everywhere.

Our Lady of Guadalupe appears throughout Tucson — in churches such as Mission San Xavier del Bac, at the base of Tumamoc Hill and on a mural in the Menlo Park neighborhood.

The Virgin of Guadalupe, as she is also called, shows up on candles and clothing and in places of personal devotion.

This dark-skinned Lady has been called empress, patroness and mother of Mexico and the Americas.

“Since she appeared in the Americas, it is what would be considered a regional devotion,” said Monsignor Raúl Trevizo, the pastor at St. John the Evangelist, 602 W. Ajo Way. “She spoke to the reality of the people of Latin America and the Southwest.”

In Tucson, devotion to the Virgin has been passed down through the generations, culminating on Dec. 12 — the feast day in her honor.

Even those who don’t know the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe relate to her as an intercessor. She is “someone to whom you pray, and you know she will take care of your prayers before God because she has a privileged place before God,” Trevizo says.

To Teresa Mancha, Our Lady of Guadalupe is dear. She learned that from her mother, who moved to the United States from Mexico in the 1940s.

Always, the family had an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe in their home. Always, they thanked her for the blessings their family received.

“We have been blessed to have no major problems,” Mancha says. “That all came from my mother, because her example was to be praying the rosary and praying to her, and she had so much devotion that she died on Dec. 12, the day of Our Lady.”

Mancha says one of her sisters found their mother on her deathbed with her rosary.

“We turn to (the Virgin) and ask her for guidance, and I believe that is the reason why everyone in our family has achieved so much,” says Mancha, who is the costume chairman for the Tucson Desert Harmony Chorus. “My father was educated to the fifth grade and migrated in the ’40s. We now have (in the family) doctors, nurses and lawyers.”

Sister Esther Calderon, too, traces her current devotion to family tradition. She remembers the vigils the night before the Dec. 12 feast. People visited the family’s home in Klondyke, near Safford, and the flowers decorated Our Lady of Guadalupe’s image.

Now Calderon, a sister of the Dominican Sisters of Peace, lives in a home called Casa Guadalupe — named such by her religious order. Images of the Virgin fill the home she shares with Sister Corina Padilla.

When Calderon runs Bible studies in prisons, inmates sometimes give her drawings of Our Lady.

Years ago, the father of one of those men built the small shrine that now protects a statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe in front of the sisters’ home. When the man’s son was released from prison, the son returned to repaint the weathered statue for the sisters.

“Her appearance was in Mexico, so the Mexican people have a really deep devotion to her,” Calderon says. “I think that’s where we get it.”

The traditions revolving around Our Lady of Guadalupe are both personal and ecclesiastical.

The night before the feast day, families might gather at home and in churches to pray the rosary and wait for dawn.

“Then, at daybreak, they would sing to Our Lady of Guadalupe what we call ‘Las Mañanitas,’ ” Trevizo says. “It’s a Mexican song and a festive song in which you greet people while celebrating their birthdays.”

After a night of prayer, morning comes with food and song.

“We don’t stay up until 5 a.m. for ‘Mañanitas’ (in church),” Trevizo says. “But after midnight, we serve food and drink hot chocolate.”

The next day, the parishes celebrate a Mass for Our Lady of Guadalupe. Other traditions include dramatizations of her appearance to Juan Diego and prayer gatherings and processions in the nine days leading up to the feast day.

“It’s nine days of prayer, and it recalls the nine months that the Virgin Mary was pregnant with the child Jesus,” Trevizo says.

In Tucson, even some without Catholic backgrounds identify with the Our Lady of Guadalupe.

“It’s an image that people understand beyond the sense of their religion, and they understand it from an archetypal human point of view of motherhood and protection,” says Susan Gamble, a practicing Episcopalian and owner of Santa Theresa Tile Works.

Gamble considers herself a “border dweller,” and she and the other artists at Santa Theresa Tile Works often draw on the region to inspire their work.

Tile Works artist Kristine Stoner created one of Gamble’s favorite depictions of Our Lady of Guadalupe as a commission for the Pio Decimo Center.

“I can imagine every young mother alive right now, especially an immigrant mother, can identify (with Mary),” Gamble says. “And the grace and dignity that she had — people can aspire to have that much love.”

Gamble sees her as both a religious and cultural symbol.

“That’s where I find her as an inspiration,” she says. “Be it a literal story or a non-literal story, I don’t care. I don’t debate that. The point is that she is woven into our fabric.”

The thunderous sound of jets overhead sends the Alzamel children running for cover under the bed.

To them, daily operations at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base sound like warplanes in Syria.

The family is safe here, but memories of war don’t fade quickly. The Alzamel family fled Daraa, their hometown in Syria, more than three years ago. They traveled on foot to Jordan with three young children. For 10 hours they walked. Nisreen Alzamel was pregnant with her fourth child — a daughter. Islam Alzamel is now 3 years old.

The Alzamels are among the first handful of Syrian families to settle here since the country’s civil war began in 2011. Arizona’s Refugee Resettlement Program reported that as of September 25, 112 Syrian refugees had made their home in Arizona in fiscal year 2015. Approximately a dozen families came to Tucson.

That number is expected to increase in the coming year. The Obama administration has said it will allow 10,000 Syrian refugees to resettle in the United States in fiscal year 2016, although rising security concerns have led to legislation in Congress to tighten screening for Iraqi and Syrian refugees.

The executive director of Refugee Focus, one of three local agencies that resettle refugees, says they were told to expect few arrivals through next March, then an uptick.

“Banning Syrian refugees won’t make America safer. It will only make them more desperate,” says Jeffrey Cornish, executive director of the International Rescue Committee in Tucson. “They are fleeing violence, including ISIS, and are seeking safety for themselves and their families.”

“IF YOU WANT TO DIE, COME TO THIS CAMP”

Before their illegal journey to Jordan, the Alzamel family spent a terrifying day lying on the ground as bullets pierced their house. Hisham Alzamel counted 18 bullets.

That morning, the government had entered Daraa hunting rebels, the family says. Hisham feared it was the last time he would see his family.

For 10 hours, they had no bathroom breaks, no sips of water. They survived to encounter fear again.

During a two-month stay in a dark basement with 300 other families, they were forced to keep quiet, they say.

Even a routine bathroom trip sparked fear. They’d hug, just in case it was goodbye.

When the Alzamels arrived in Zaatari Refugee Camp in Jordan, they joined thousands of other refugees. They sought medical attention — Nisreen needed a cesarean section and all three children were ill.

“They could not get U.N. refugee help. They were told if you want a C-section, you have to pay,” says Rania Kanawati, translating for the family. “Either pay or do it in the tent.”

Nisreen sold her ring to pay for the care.

A tent was provided for them to live in, but the scorching heat pushed them to live behind it, where there was shade. When sandstorms struck, they hid their faces in their hands.

They used to say, “If you want to die, come to this camp.”

When they could bear it no longer, they used money carried from Syria to help them pay rent in Jordan. They had brought half of their money — $4,000. The rest was hidden in their chimney back home, but they say it was taken, along with Hisham’s bus, when the house was raided.

INTERVIEW, HEARTBREAK

With their hometown in Hama, Syria, overrun by heavy bombing and tanks, Mouffak Beij and his wife, Roukia Al Younes Al Masri, fled with six of their 10 children.

They walked a mile to wait for a bus to take them to Jordan. When it arrived, it was overflowing with others fleeing.

Terrified their children would be forced to join the fighting, the parents pushed the oldest kids onto the bus. The plan was to meet at a designated spot in Jordan.

For four days, they waited on the street for another bus. They finally made it to Jordan, where they used their savings to rent a house rather than stay at a refugee camp.

They were there for four years until a yearlong interview process ended with their clearance to resettle in the United States. And with that joy came more heartbreak.

Their 23-year-old son had been denied entrance to the United States. He would not be migrating with them.

“WE LIVE TOGETHER
OR WE DIE TOGETHER”

Life in the U.S. is difficult for the Beij family without their son. With the decline of Mouffak’s health, their eldest son is needed to help support the family. They also miss four of their married daughters — two in Jordan, two in Syria.

There is no indication of when or if their son will be allowed to join the family. He told his parents that if he doesn’t hear from the U.N. soon, he will take a boat to Europe.

Mouffak says he will stay in the United States until the financial assistance from the resettlement agency runs out. If his son is not here by then, the family will go back.

“We live together or we die together,” he says through an interpreter.

If the Beijs’ son does get clearance, resettlement agencies will work to place him with his family. But he still has to go through the process — which includes security screening and DNA checks to ensure he is related. That could take a long time.

“That’s really frustrating for families and it’s frustrating for us,” says Craig Thoresen, executive director of the Phoenix-based resettlement agency Refugee Focus. The agency also has an office in Tucson.

COMPASSION, SECURITY

Since the recent terrorist attacks in Paris and Beirut, many U.S. governors, including Arizona’s, have called for a halt to allowing Syrian refugees into their states. The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed legislation to increase the vetting process for refugees from Syria and Iraq.

Security screenings are important, but closing our doors to refugees would be a decision based on fear, says Jill Rich, who worked closely with the Lost Boys of Sudan.

“This country was built to be compassionate and yet we’re saying we’re not going to allow in the most vulnerable populations in the world,” Rich says. “It doesn’t makes sense to me. We need to continue to be a compassionate society, because if not, the enemies have won.”

With the intense screening process and security vetting, coming to the U.S. as a refugee would be a difficult and time-consuming way for terrorists to get in.

“Terrorists can enter countries much easier than coming the refugee route,” Thoresen says. “Why would they wait years and go through all this scrutiny when they can come easier? It would be easier to come on a work visa. There’s far less scrutiny.”

Secretary Jeh Johnson of the Department of Homeland Security addressed fears of allowing in Syrians in a statement emphasizing efforts to better secure the Visa Waiver Program and tighten airport security.

“Since the attacks in Paris, there has been anxiety across our country,” his statement reads. “I understand that anxiety. But, in this environment, we must guard against actions that are ill-considered, misdirected and counterproductive. We must focus our efforts on measures that will actually strengthen our screening of those who travel to the United States, and better secure the homeland.”

Even as detailed outlines of the vetting process circulate, many still worry about the accessibility of Syrian records.

“If we don’t have the connections in Syria or if (the databases) are wiped clean … it’s a legitimate concern in that it may be true,” Cornish, of the International Rescue Committee, said during a recent forum for Tucson churches. “But there are other ways we can verify their identity and their past. ... The State Department, the FBI and Homeland Security are very much aware of these deficiencies, and they do everything they can to make up for them.”

EXPECTATIONS VS. REALITY

Before moving to the U.S., Roukia imagined skyscrapers and skylines when she thought about America.

“Tucson is very similar to their hometown in Syria,” says Kanawati, the translator who met the family shortly after they arrived in Tucson about five months ago. “Overseas, when they talk about America, they show you the skyline … so when you come, you want to see that.”

Roukia is thankful for her life in the U.S. But like so many, the difficult transition is a surprise.

“The father struggles because of the way they used to live in Syria,” Kanawati says. “They are educated people, and to see his son working as a dishwasher is very difficult to accept.”

The family’s 22-year-old son works part-time washing dishes at a sushi restaurant. His is the family’s primary income. Before they fled Syria, he was studying to be an engineer at Aleppo University.

Hisham Alzamel, too, feels the sting of insufficient employment. His family arrived in Tucson late last summer. In Syria, he was a bus driver. Here, he has struggled to find a job.

“The husband is desperate to give more to his family and find a job,” Kanawati says. The children ask about television and iPads — luxuries they once knew.

Many refugees work in the hospitality industry as housekeepers or dishwashers. Those with stronger English skills become security guards or work in health care, Cornish says.

Thoresen, with Refugee Focus, compared Syrian refugees to those from Iraq. Many were professionals and educated, sometimes in the United States.

WHAT THE AGENCIES DO

Upon arrival, refugees in Arizona receive at least 90 days of help and $925 to be spent on behalf of each person.

That money — from agency contracts with the Department of State — must be committed before the 90 days end. It goes toward immediate needs such as furnishing an apartment, filling the refrigerator with food for arrival day and helping with rent and utilities.

Refugees also receive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the state’s Two Parent Employment Program, along with food stamps and insurance through Arizona’s Medicaid agency. Finally, they’re offered cultural orientation.

“That’s the very initial adjustment period, where we try to take care of all the necessities so people are stable, the kids are in school, and they are building friendships,” Thoresen says.

After 90 days, some families may qualify for targeted help finding a job and additional funding for rent from the Office of Refugee Resettlement through the Department of Health and Human Services. That can last up to 180 days after arrival, but at that point, the money flow stops.

Some services such as English instruction, medical help and transportation may continue for up to five years.

Agencies aim to guide refugees to self sufficiency within three to six months — and that happened about 85 percent of the time last fiscal year, Cornish says.

“Most families succeed,” Thoresen says. “Are there homeless refugees or refugees in jail? Unfortunately, the answer is yes. It’s a small number, but we’re not saving people. We’re giving people a chance.”

DAY-TO-DAY CHALLENGES

For three years, the Alzamel children lived in turmoil — fleeing Syria and scraping by in Jordan.

School was not part of that experience.

Now they are back in the classroom, in the sixth, fifth and second grades.

It’s frustrating trying to catch up when they don’t speak the language. They feel lost.

The kids learn other subjects in English and then work with an English language development, or ELD, teacher who does not speak Arabic. At school districts like Tucson Unified, these teachers often work with students from around the world.

Julie Kasper, founder of the refugee education hub CENTER and a former ELD teacher at Catalina Magnet High School, has seen the challenges refugee kids face in school, from language barriers to dietary limitations at lunchtime.

“There are schools where there is a pullout model where students are in a classroom with peers all day except for an hour, or there are schools with specific classes that offer all of the instruction with an ESL component,” Kasper says.

Of the five Beij children who now live in Tucson, four attend the Al Huda International School of Languages, where teachers speak Arabic.

“Then the kids come home and teach the parents English,” says Kanawati, chair of the school’s board.

The family can send their children to that school because the children’s tuition is sponsored by donations and because they have transportation — they spent their teenage daughter’s dowry money on a car.

A NEW LIFE

Those who work with Tucson’s refugee population say the city has long opened its arms to newcomers from other countries.

“It’s been very welcoming, a very warm place for refugees to come,” Rich says.

Kanawati moved to the U.S. from Syria about 23 years ago for school. As a board member at the Islamic Center of Tucson, she has worked with refugees from Somalia and Afghanistan.

Tucson is a good city for refugees, she says. She finds people want to help, want to donate clothes or furniture, want to make others welcome.

Because Kanawati wears hijaab, or head scarf, she is used to questions.

“Right now, when I tell them I’m from Syria, people support me and say nice stuff. Other people just stare and stay quiet,” she says.

After almost four months in Tucson, Nisreen sees her children changing.

“They feel peace here. They tell their parents that,” Kanawati says, translating for Nisreen. “The kids trust people. Before, they thought, ‘They are going to kill us.’ They are adjusting.”