Working for Pap was my first job. I was 15 the summer he hired me on. It was the beginning of my relationship with death. You can’t help but get intimate with it in a cemetery; it surrounds you. Even at 15, I could feel the chill of its fingers when I was six feet down smoothing the sides of the graves.
Even on the sunniest summer day, the feeling of being in that hole and knowing someone will be dropped in the spot your standing for eternity, well, it’s hard to explain just what it feels like. Creepy and eerie are the two words that come to mind, but I’m not sure they do it justice. It’s more a sense of foreboding and a strange realization that someone no longer living will be resting where you are standing. All I know for certain is I wanted to get out of that hole as fast as possible.
That first summer I went home and thought about my own death every time I dug a plot. I’d spend the nights staring at the ceiling, sweating in the summer heat and wondering when I would go and how? It scared me.
I didn’t have time for fear when I was in the hole. Pap was always sitting up above in the backhoe, Camel dangling from the corner of his mouth, pointing out different spots he thought I’d missed in my efforts to smooth down the sides. It felt like torture at the time, but when I look back on it, I realize he was teaching me two lessons.
First off, he wanted it done perfect. He took pride in his work and wanted to provide the people who were buried in the cemetery and their families with a perfect, beautiful spot for their final resting place. There was no task so small it shouldn’t be executed to perfection.
Second, and involving more extrapolation, he wanted me to take full advantage of every second of my life; live it to its maximum. I know I felt a strong desire to live after being down in the grave. It’s strange, because my head wasn’t that far from the top of the hole when I was digging and tamping, but the air felt cleaner and I felt more alive when I came up from smoothing those edges. Pap would always say, “I bet that tastes good,” when I climbed out, than chortle to himself.
That last bit may sound clichéd, but it is the truth, and I’m sure he knew it well. He’d dug hundreds of these graves himself, burying a good chunk of Berwick over his 48 years as caretaker. It must have provided perspective and it explained some of the bitterness – putting people to rest after having watched them waste what time they had being a chief cause.
