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A grave matter

The Source

It was perhaps one of the strangest and most fascination conversations I’ve ever had. Sean was our young guide for Edinburgh, Scotland, and we were sitting in a pub near our hotel. Since very few European guides are employed full-time as herders of lost Americans, I asked him what he did for living when the Yanks weren’t in town. He said, “Well, I’m trained as a grave digger.” I thought he was kidding. “You’re a grave digger?” “I went to schooling for it. In Scotland you have to be trained in most cities. I needed a job after college and my town was offering the course.” I was hooked. My Uncle Harris was an undertaker and I’d sometimes hang around his place and help out here and there, but I’d never known much about the actual grave digging. I bought our guide another pint and pumped him for more information. He began by talking about the depth of the graves. “You don’t go six feet down, at least not in Scotland.” He explained that the six-foot requirement harkened back to the old days of wooden caskets that caved in after a few years in the ground. “Four foot down is the law,” he said. “It varies from town to town, but we’re four-footers. If they use a vault it’ll never cave in.” I was curious what there was to the job that would require taking a class and he took another sip then responded, “It’s most safety…precautions, you know. Lots of things can go wrong.” Go wrong? Simply digging a hole? “When the headstone falls in, that’s no good,” he said. “Takes a lot of work to reset a headstone. You’ve got to call the concrete men and that’s an expensive bother.” What else? “The worst is a re-open.” Re-open? “When you open an occupied grave. . .usually happens with married people who want to be buried together but they rarely die at the same time, so you’ve got to do a re-open and move the first body.” This conversation was quickly becoming more interesting than the tour of Heidelberg Castle that he’d given earlier in the day. “You see,” he said, “you’re in the grave, digging down to remove the casket and it your foot goes through the lid. It can hurt and it’s…well…just not something you want to think about.” I told Sean that it must surely be a fascinating profession. “No,” he said. “It’s pretty dull. Mostly you just dig. All day. Not a load of laughs.” He went on to explain that most of the digging is now done with mechanized excavator or JCB. “But you’ve got to start the grave by hand, and re-opens, they’re hand digging all the way.” He said that he needed to go to bed but I urged him to talk a bit more. “Neatness is important,” he said. “The edges of the grave have to be sharp. Most funeral directors have fake grass that they put around the lip of grave, but your corners have to be sharp. That’s hard sometimes….and of course there’s nothing more embarrassing than not digging the hole wide enough. I mean, it’s not like you get to see the casket while you’re digging the hole.” So what if the hole he digs isn’t big enough to accommodate the casket? “If you’re just a bit off you can shove it down, but worse comes to worse you get your spade and go at it again.” I let Sean go back to his room to bone up on attractions we’d be visiting on the following day, but I thanked him for sharing a bit of this little-known profession. My only knowledge of grave digging came from tales of an old man named Wheezer. My uncle the undertaker would often hire Wheezer to dig graves for him and the old guy was always in need of a quick job to buy his next drink. Uncle Harris sternly warned Wheezer never to dig a grave when he was drunk and the poor old guy tried to follow those instructions, but he found he couldn’t stay sober all day long in hopes that a digging job would be coming up. In the winter it was Wheezer’s custom to use a small stick of dynamite to bust loose the frozen soil and Uncle Harris allowed this as long as Wheezer would remember to carry the dynamite and his matches in separate pockets of his overalls. Wheezer could have continued his digging career if he’d only known how to read. My uncle had drawn a map of where Mr. Wilson was to be buried beside his already deceased wife, but Wheezer misread the map. Uncle Harris recounted the event years later. I won’t go into the details, but when Wheezer stuck the dynamite in the wrong spot he had some re-burying to do. I told this tale to Sean the tour guide the following morning as we hopped on the bus to Barmoral Castle. He chucked and said, “Silly blood Yanks. You need to start offering courses.”