Cemeteries: Do I Have To?

Yesterday I went to graveside services for a close friend of a friend, more in a support role, really, which is how funerals are sometimes.

I'd forgotten how sanitized it all is.  The deferential funeral director who knows the drill and moves everything along.   Everyone else, humbled by the momentousness--after all, someone has died--gratefully ushered through it all.   The hearse appears, people line up, you drive to the grave site, which is draped in astroturf so you can't see the dirt.

The last graveside event I went to--not exactly a service--was eight years ago.  My sister-in-law, Delilah, died.  T here was no undertaker because she had a home burial.  Jerry's brother  Peter had dug the grave over a period of weeks.

When Peter called to ask us to come, he wanted us to run a couple of errands:  We were to pick up a cardboard coffin from the hospice in the small  town near where they lived in  Humboldt County and then go to the grocery store and buy butter and beer.

We did as we were told.  Then we drove out to Peter's and wrestled the knocked-down coffin out of the car.  Peter and Jerry set it up, and Peter measured it to make sure it would fit in the grave.  His daughter arrived from Oregon, and the two of them settled Delilah in the coffin.  Then Peter tied it with a rope and slid it down a plank from a second-storey bedroom window to the ground, where we received it.  The four of us carried Delilah in her coffin, her head resting on her beloved and ancient jean jacket,  to the grave.

Which turned out to be too small.  The coffin wouldn't fit.  Peter sprinted back to his workshop for a shovel and dug out some more dirt.  Finally, the grave was big enough, and the three of them painstakingly lowered the coffin into it while I guided it.   The coffin got hung up on one corner, and I had to push on it with my foot to make it fit. 

It took a lot of dirt to fill the hole.    We shoveled like mad.  The sun was slipping lower in the sky. Two dogs frolicked nearby. Finally, when the grave was full and I was just about to initiate a little service, starting with the words to "Now the Day Is Over," the dogs began yelping.  They'd been stung by swarm of wasps. We threw down our shovels and ran for the house. I got stung on the midriff. 



Delilah's grave, partly covered by heart-shaped rocks

 

 

 

I was traumatized by this experience.  I had never buried anyone personally, and I hope never to again.

I began to wonder, yesterday,  standing in the damp manicured grass, if there was something between the sanitized mortuary burial and the hands-on, horrifyingly real burial of Delilah.  Maybe not.

I resolved to be cremated.  For sure.