For someone so full of life, Marie Herrera Dresser seems to deal with death quite a bit.

A few years ago she worked holes in her fingers sewing quilts to raffle off to build a fence for the Cañon del Carnuel Cemetery. She also spends time sitting with people nearing the end of their lives and has kept more than 20 people company during their final weeks and months, she said.

She has cultivated the kind of strength needed to deal with difficult times over the course of her long life.

Born in 1937, Dresser grew up in hard times on the Carnuel Land Grant. She had 15 brothers and sisters, 11 of whom survived to adulthood.

Her family earned money by taking a horse-drawn cart loaded with firewood, corn or beans into Albuquerque's university area to sell them. In those days it was rare for a person from the area to have a car, she said.

"Most people were poor," she said. "Now people are spoiled."

She said her family made from $1 to $1.50 per wagon load. She said her family would leave at 4 a.m. and be back home by 9 p.m.

"It was slow going into town and slow going back," she said. "We would build a bonfire around Juan Tabo (Boulevard) and have some breakfast and go into town."

She said her dogs would follow the family's two wagons into town and get lost there. In about two or three days the dogs would find their way back home, though.

On the way back home, the family would sometimes stop at a gas station outside of Albuquerque called the Oasis for a cinnamon roll or two for the children. Herrera said that if no one was there, they'd leave money on the counter. People expected other people to be honest, she said.

"I lock my doors now; I didn't used to," she said.

When her brother fell off the back of a wagon and broke his arm, it was Herrera's mother who set the bones and strapped his arm to a board.

"My mom was our doctor, our nurse," she said.

She said her brother's arm healed well and hasn't given him trouble since.

The common bond of poverty, which was shared throughout Carnuel, led her to work to get a new cemetery for Carnuel, she said.

She realized the area needed a new cemetery in 1987, when her father was buried in Carnuel's old cemetery, which is nearly full. Over the years she petitioned the presidents of the land grant for land for a new cemetery. She persisted and asked three different land grant presidents for the land until her request was granted.

Then she set out to make money to build a fence around the cemetery, including sewing 11 quilts and raffling them off and holding a few bingos.

There was a hitch in her plan, though.

Before she was done raising enough money for the fence, Herrera needed to have a surgery done in an Albuquerque hospital. She asked the Rev. Mark Granito of Holy Child Parish in Tijeras to hold on to the money until she got back.

"I didn't know what was going to happen," she said. "To tell the truth, I don't trust doctors."

The surgery went well and the money, about $5,000, was used to build a fence, she said.

"I did it because most of us, when we were growing up, we were all poor and didn't have no money and I just wanted to do something for the people," she said