Grave Digger

"It must be a very quiet workday."
"Someone in your position must have a lot of people under you."
"At least the customers don’t complain!"


These are just some of the comments I used to hear from people when I would mention that I worked at a cemetery. Others weren’t so good-humored. I sometimes would get looks of consternation and repugnance upon my admission, followed by the question, “You don’t bury people, do you?”

Well, yes I did.

I first became employed at a cemetery in the east end of Toronto doing landscape work in the summers during university. Myself and a small army of my peers spent eight hours a day, from May to August, cutting grass, planting flowers, trimming hedges and weeding beds. It was monotonous, tiring work that was made bearable by the intense camaraderie between the student workers as well as the staff’s outlandish sense of humour.

But when September came and my bank account was not as full as it should have been, I asked the cemetery manager if there was any work on the weekends during the rest of the year.

“Well, there’s cleaning to be done,” he said.

Perfect, I thought. Easy.

“And you can help out with any weekend funerals.”

Oh.

And so just like that, I became Toronto’s first female gravedigger. (That the guys I worked with had ever heard of.)

Being the only female in a work environment is hard enough, never mind when the work is physical and some of the employees are closed-minded. There were several rolled eyes when the boys found out that I had been hired to help them dig graves. Granted, I needed to pump a bit more iron before I could effectively manoeuvre the jackhammer (needed to drill into frozen Canadian soil in February), but I learned to drive the tractor and backhoe, operate the waterpump, and move 200-pound gravestones using a metal lever as good as any man.

My first few funerals went smoothly – we dug the graves, stood in the background during the burial, and filled in the grave once the mourners had dispersed. I ran into my first spot of trouble one mild January day when we had to hand dig a grave in a rather crowded section of the cemetery. The ground had thawed and was therefore very wet, so when we started to dig, the grave filled with water almost immediately and soon the sides began caving in. The bottom of the grave was a pit of thick, muddy water. Thanking our lucky stars we had started early, we set the water pump in motion, scooped out as much mud as we could and covered the soggy bottom of the hole with leaves to disguise the muck.

When the mourners arrived, they began filing through the headstones, when all of a sudden the widow yelled out, “They’ve got the wrong plot! It’s in the wrong place!” My boss and I exchanged worried looks, not even wanting to consider what would happen next if we’d made a mistake. A kind relative came to the rescue and reassured the widow that the plot was the correct one, and the service proceeded.

The icing on the cake was when the widow passed out onto the wet grass as the mourners began to shovel earth into the grave. I leaned over to my boss and whispered, “Now there is officially nothing else that can go wrong today.”

Then there was the time we were digging a grave in front of a double monument. The left side was engraved with the details of the husband who had died and been buried several years before. Naturally, we began to dig in front of the right side of the headstone, which was blank. About four feet down, we hit a wooden box and soon realized that the engraver had engraved the wrong side of the gravestone. We quickly filled in the grave and dug in front of the left side, leaving the problem up to the monument maker.

People often ask me if I found it sad watching all those people bury their loved ones. You do acquire a professional distance that comes with dealing with something so emotional on such a regular basis – I’m sure social workers and palliative care nurses must step outside themselves to do their jobs. But there was one funeral that did affect me more than the others. It was a funeral for a baby of only a few months.

The grave was tiny, a small hollow dug easily by hand, and the modest casket was lowered in by two canvas straps in place of the metal device that was usually used. Instead of the large numbers of mourners that usually attended funerals at the cemetery, this funeral only had two – the mother and father. The rabbi recited the Hebrew verse that I became so familiar with and handed the shovel to the mother for her to throw on the first bit of earth. She weakly dug the shovel into the pile of soil beside the grave, balancing a small amount on the head. She slowly swung the shovel over top of the grave and then stopped, her shoulders shaking. She squeezed her eyes tight, attempting to stifle her tears. Her husband put his arms around her and helped her release the earth into the grave. It is the only funeral where I have ever cried.

After a few years, I left my position of gravedigger in pursuit of less-taxing, salaried endeavours. I’ve been everything from a bank teller to a medical secretary to a teacher. I certainly don’t miss the early mornings and the monotony of pushing a lawnmover for hours on end, but the one thing I can say for the profession of gravedigging, is that the customers never complain.