Friends, acquaintances, mentors have begun to leave the earth in numbers too big to digest. Norman Mailer passed on this weekend, Fritz Scholder in 2005, Helen, a family matriarch and Ed Bradley last year, Kate Webb this past spring. I refuse to believe they are dead. In some celebratory way of keeping my companions near, I may have to start a wall of photos I have taken of them over the decades. It is the beginning of the end of an era, my era. And it is hard to swallow.

There are negatives and photos all over my office floor. A call from a researcher at the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian, looking for a photo of Fritz that I had taken 30 years ago — forced me to pull out of a deep closet boxes and boxes and boxes of negatives, slides and prints that had been thrown in them five or six moves ago. The museum is mounting a Scholder show in October 2008, and someone there had seem someplace, in some publication or another, one of the hundreds of photos I had taken of Fritz in the '70s and '80s. Were it not for my fondness for Fritz and massive appreciation of his work, I would have simply said it is all too much work to dig through the mess — as it has been. But there, this past week, were photos of Norman Mailer, taken at his apartment in New York and some taken one summer in Massachusetts.

I've always loved the New York photos of Mailer as the huge Lego city that he built in that apartment is the backdrop for some of the photos — Mailer looming as large as Robert Moses or Frank Gehry or some grand and glorious city builder but all out of Legos and not concrete. Amidst the piles as I am looking for some Fritz photos there is the one of Bradley and his buddy Jim Vance on a white sofa with a black and white mural behind them painted on the wall. Bradley has a slight Afro and his feet are planted squarely on the ground. There is a picture of Helen seated grandly in a chair celebrating her 80th with enough flowers around her on the floor and table to give the impression it was a funeral and not a birthday.

The negatives of things and people I saw in the fall of 1976 in Southern China are mixed together with photos from the Philippines in 1977, Thailand and Cambodia in 1978 and '79, and all those are tribute to Kate Webb and any woman foreign correspondent as well as to the refugees and street people who posed for a photo. And all those photos are mixed in with Santa Fe in the early '70s when I was the photographer for the local newspaper. The nuns with their hands over their mouths, watching Loretto Chapel burn, Christmas lights on the Plaza, Paul Newman in his trailer on a movie shoot, Johnny Cash — now also passed on — on the Jicarilla Apache Reservation in another movie filming, children at Southside school on opening day some year. Those children are now grandparents, and all that is a lot to take in, particularly since I had forgotten that I had taken those thousands and thousands of pictures.

Slides of Paris are dumped in a box with slides of Robert Redford skiing at Sundance some nearly 40 years ago. Pictures of our dogs mixed in with London, Brussels and Spain all break the illusion I have had of late that I am a very organized person. All my illusions will eventually slip away. What will remain, forever, I hope, is my contact with those now slipping away, ending an era, but not a contact.

— — —

Lynne Bundesen is the author of five books on religion and was adjunct professor at the Boston Theological Institute under a Templeton Science and Religion Grant. She is currently the spiritual expert for the physical and spiritual health website of Dr. Andrew Weil. Her book "The Feminine Spirit: Recapturing the Heart of Scripture" was just published. Her email address is {email lynnebundesen@hotmail.com}lynnebundesen@hotmail.com{/email}. © Copyright 2007 by Lynne Bundesen.