DISCOVER
OJAI MONTHLY WHO DIGS YOUR GRAVE? I spent six years digging graves, then another another six in the military before I set foot in a college classroom. I never felt like I missed much. Where I was once ashamed to have performed such lowly labors, now I am proud.
Bret Bradigan
My brothers and I have different recollections of our many hours spent digging graves. They remember our dad paying them $5 or so for their labors, usually 3-4 hours to dig a grave that was 7 feet long by 4 feet wide and 54 inches deep (the old saw about six feet deep is rooted in myth, anything deeper than the 4.5 feet is totally unnecessary). I never, or at least rarely, got paid; my dad must have realized he was already providing board and keep, what did I need the money for anyway? I think he thought I’d buy drugs with it. He was probably right. In November 1963, a young New York Herald reporter named Jimmy Breslin, shut out of the scree and scrum of reporters in the mad wake of confusion of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, found another way into the story, one that didn’t depend on “access journalism” of inside government sources cultivated over decades. He saw a grim, determined man named Clifton Pollard at Arlington National Cemetery, working with a spade and backhoe, and interviewed him instead. Look it up, “Jimmy Breslin’s Gravedigger Story.” Pollard said of the sad duty, “It’s an honor.” I know what he meant. It’s a classic feature that echoes through the years, while the breathless reports of JFK’s tragedy from the veteran reporters, the Beltway insiders with quotes from bureaucrats and campaign organizers, are now long forgotten, the next day’s birdcage liner and fish wrap. Gravedigging is hard, sweaty work. Toil in a biblical sense. The ceaseless shoveling. First with the sharp-edged spade around the edges of the red-painted wood template with the angle irons. Then rolling up the sod and placing those lumpy coils in a cool shady spot, then covering them with a damp shade cloth. Another half hour or more of hard work of shoveling away the top soil, which went either into our tractor’s trailer, or into a wheelbarrow where it was unceremoniously dumped over the edge of the cemetery into the raspberry bushes in the upper cemetery, or into the hardwood forest in Forestville’s lower cemetery. Then the main act, digging out at least two dozen wheelbarrow loads of dirt, to pile up to await the memorial service. If access allowed, the backhoe operator could scoop out the grave in minutes, and I'd only be required to clean up the edges with the spade. But he took half the fee, $75 of the $150 my dad earned, a lot of money in the mid-1970s, so it was always a tradeoff. Cheap labor was a key reason to have a lot of kids in those days. I learned more working in cemeteries than any classroom; it was where the human condition was laid bare. Ashes to ashes. I learned that princes and paupers share fate, that an honest day’s work is worth something for your character, to endure unpleasantness and pain and boredom. Because life will do that. Better to learn those lessons while young. Also that there’s an impeccable state of mind within reach, to perform one final act of service for someone’s mortal remains, to honor them and all humanity. To feel the succession of generations, of birth and life all flowing through your labor, the march of humanity from past to future. It was far from boring. There’s a quality to hard labor that frees your mind. I’m hardly the first to say so. Viktor Frankl, (“Man’s Search for Meaning,”) said it best. My resolve to make something of myself was forged in that sweat and heat and discomfort. It wasn’t quite the “why” that made Frankl’s "any how” possible, but it was a handy stand in. It started me on a journey that led to Ojai, so I'm grateful. Every year our Rotary Club does a service project, cleaning brush and debris from Nordhoff cemetery. It's an honor It's a familiar place to me, and I wonder about the local gravediggers, if they pause to reflect about the lives of the people they lay into eternal rest. I'll bet they do. I know I did.
OM — June 2022
7
