WORCESTER: I was a Teenage Gravedigger, Pt I

WORCESTER: I WAS A TEENAGE GRAVE DIGGER Pt 1

I was a gravedigger many years ago in my home town, Worcester, MA. An interesting summer job.

As a grave digger I was in pretty lofty company. Abraham Lincoln as a sexton in a church dug graves. Shakespeare understood the importance of gravediggers. In “Hamlet” at the burial site of Ophelia, we meet two of “us” and some light hearted banter. Both Lenin and Trotsky of the 1918 Russian revolution saw the bourgeois as grave diggers – for their own graves!

Merriam-Webster’s web site defines a gravedigger as “one that digs graves especially as a means of livelihood.” Oh, and the site also informs you that this word is currently in the “bottom 20% of look-ups.”

Gravedigging is a very important and unheralded occupation and has often been a contentious labor issue with far reaching consequences. In 1992 Chicago’s unionized gravediggers went on strike just before Christmas and by the first week of January, 1993 over 200 bodies had yet to be properly interred.

In January ,1979 in Liverpool England gravediggers had gone on strike along with sanitation workers. Soon over 150 bodies were awaiting burial with about 25 more per day. The City Council considered allowing family members or private contractors to dig the graves but were concerned about “unseemly scenes at cemetery gates” with union members.

And in 1919 gravediggers at St Michael s Cemetery on Long Island, NY went on strike to demand a pay raise from $3.75 to $4.00 per day and a six day work week, according to the NYT “TimesMachine” site.

T here shouldn’t be much levity in gravedigging or lounging about in a graveyard, but in Mel Brook’s 1971 masterpiece ”Young Frankenstein” as Dr. Frank Frankenstein (Gene Wilder) and Igor (Marty Feldman) attempt to wrench a coffin out of the ground, Dr. Frank says: “What a filthy job.” Igor remarks: “It could be worse.” Dr. Frank :” How? Igor: “ It could be raining.” And you guessed it. It begins to pour.

                                                              I would arrive at the cemetery around 7:30AM. There was a crew of about 2 or 3 that showed up each morning to get our daily assignments. The Manager, Louis, was a tall angular fellow with close cropped gray kinky hair. We called him the old man. He had a severe case of psoriasis especially on his hands and arms. When he gestured small flakes of dry skin would waft down onto the floor. We would glance at each other and hold back the laughter.

Most of crew were teenagers like me, happy to have a summer job with outside work. Every now and then an older guy would appear and I often wondered about his life. What paths did he lead or leave behind thatn brought him to this time and place.

His office was adjacent to the non denominational chapel where services were held. His office also served as a crematorium . The outside wall was lined with scolded red bricks and in the center was the door where the (wooden) coffins, stripped of their handles, would be pushed along a light rail deep into the oven.

He would give us our daily work orders and then motion to the oven door. “Jack, you’ ll help ,me with the job.” The job was the cremation. And Jack was me.

On a table near a window that overlooked the cemetery was a collection of artificial hip sockets and other surgically inserted body paraphernalia that was not consumed by the pyre. We weren’t sure if there was any order to how these things were displayed. We hoped there was none. That would have been really odd. But Louis did take some perverse enjoyment from the collection. Every now and then he would hold a hip joint socket in his palm, study it for a moment and exclaim: “ This guy was a big guy.”

Days before a scheduled funeral Louis holding a rolled up engineering plat of the cemetery’s section ,and I would walk to the area of the burial site. I usually held 4 or 5 small pointed wooden stakes. Louis would pull out a measuring tape and placing it in an exact spot have me walk the tape to the dimensions he called. “ Stop!” I would stop and hammer a stake where the tape directed. A couple more measurements and we had the four corners of the grave staked, string lines attached and the poor deceased’ s final resting spot was now ready for excavation.

Rod Stewart the famous British singer performed this grave site measuring/stringing activity in an English cemetery giving rise to the myth that he once was a gravedigger. “It's a

delicious, mysterious piece of back-story”” he said. I think he perpetrated the myth because it attracted girls. In my world it didn’t.

The dump truck holding all our tools would be backed onto the grave site area. Included were rolls of green shiny plastic artificial grass. We removed the sod and then Louis drove the backhoe and opened the grave. The bucket would place the dirt aside the grave and level it out. One of the crew members would jump into the grave , remove the last few inches and square the base . “ Tight square, tight corners,” Louis called out.

The back hoe lifted the rectangular concrete vault pieces into position first the base then the four sides. I usually had the duty of jumping into the grave and directing the pieces so that there was a snug fit. “ Count those fingers, Jack” Louis would say, “ Be sure you climb of there with all ten.”The cap remained on the truck. The vault will prevent the grave from caving-in as the wooden coffin deteriorates over the decades.

Back hoe removed, we rolled out the plastic green grass around the grave and spread it smooth. Sometimes a canopy was erected which interfered with our grave closure routine. We loaded the tools and half hidden by a maple tree, lit cigarettes and awaited the procession and muffled words

I did not know their names or anything about the deceased. But I vividly remember watching the assembled mourners standing along the grave’s edge glancing down into the impenetrable bronze/back rectangular hole that I and the crew had recently excavated. And as soon as the last mourner had departed the grave, as soon as the last vehicle was loaded and rolling towards the graveyard entrance the crew would pounce onto the gravesite. In a well rehearsed style we rolled up the grass sheaths, had the concrete cap settled onto the grave and then begin the task of filling the grave with the excavated soil. We used a tamping bar to insure the dirt was solidly packed around all edges. We laid the sod and tamped it down tight. The grass would cover all the disturbance of burial.

I was always reminded of Carl Sandburg’s poem “Grass” a homage and lamentation to battlefield deaths. “I am the grass ;I cover all. I am the grass. Let me do my work.”

I think back upon those moments when our crew sat idle waiting for the burial ceremony to end. We were young; we had no experience with funerals or death. But now 40 years on, I’m sure those grave digging crew members, like me, have attended a fair share of burial ceremonies. Mothers, fathers, siblings, children, dear friends.

And as I stood over my father’s grave one rainy Monday morning many years ago, I knew nearby, out of view a grave digging crew was waiting… with a job to do.

END