Skip to content

Planting The Dead to Grow Despair

Some weeks ago, I came across this fake news piece, a sales pitch disguised as science which upset me gravely.

Denying the Earth of the best possible fertilizer cannot be construed as good for the environment. Embalming fluid is bullshit (even if created by the same man who invented root beer), as are the concrete boxes coffins of first world nations get buried in (which every zombie movie ignorantly omits). Society should change the asinine regulations mandating that garbage before looking to reinvent the wheel. There is no place for middle-men, for fancy window-dressing or ornamentation, only the age-old truth of returning us to where we came from. Just put the body in the ground.

The entire funeral process in the United States is already an over-priced circus. Especially when immediately following unconscionably excessive medical bills. Away from the blustering noise of modernity, cemeteries are easily among the prettiest and safest parks anywhere, for a reason. I worked as a gravedigger for years and know this to be true from first-hand experience.

We were actually busiest in the wintertime, because the frailer elderly and the homeless all have the hardest times with severe cold. While we did use shovels to level edges and stab out roots, we only used them to dig graves for infants, out of respect. It was this cool, unspoken rule. All other graves were trenched by machinery driven by men and women open to introspection. The phrase “graveyard shift” actually originated from graveyards of long ago, where drunks would be hired to watch over the greens in case the experts of medical sciences miscalled a death. I’ve heard of Scottish folklore conveying that the last person buried wherever would watch over that land, until replaced by another. Like a smoke break before the probably not instantaneous journey to what lies beyond. But it’s why graves are together rather than wherever. In the springtime, serious joggers more interested in exercise than being seen would take advantage of the gardens. Students would sketch the monuments.

Often gravediggers must fill-in as pall-bearers, because not everyone leaves behind lots of family and friends. For that reason alone was this the only job I ever cut my hair for. Older graves might invariably collapse like the bodies they contain, and thus require a fill-in themselves. Re-stabilizing sunken plots is not fun in storms, although slipping in mud was seen as a rite of passage, “tasting coffin juice”. The main site I worked for, Cave Hill, was over 170 years old. Sometimes we’d dig for a grave and there would already be something down below. This happens fairly often with older graveyards. I spent my 30th birthday working there, and still saved the call-sheet because of the strange omen of the day. There were five burials scheduled, an average for that time of year, with one possessing my first name and another possessing my last name.

The photograph at the front of this website was from another, Eastern Star, where some exteriors for the Return of the Living Dead movie had been filmed many years prior. I dug there too. Supposedly, Eastern Star would not allow African-Americans or Jews to be buried there until the late 1970s, just to be dicks. Currently the masonic owners have a deal worked out with the state penitentiary to maintain the grounds. Long decades ago, Eastern Star was part of Cave Hill, and there remains a natural, elaborate cave system running underneath the neighboring properties. Which plays a role in the invariably collapsing graves.

I had developed a theory that the regional flood of 1937 was man-made specifically to drown out something living down below in these caves. While digging there, I eventually grew aware of the fact that a great many of the ornate statues spread about were missing their left hands. This may have been due to some previous fraternity prank of years gone by, with a box of stone hands sitting long-forgotten in some basement in Kentucky. Or the missing hands may be attributed to something darker. I brought the subject up once with a resident gardener who had by then worked the greens for roughly thirty years, and he confessed to having never realized the missing hands, which number quite literally into the dozens.

Suffice to say, while most guests are not big on talking, cemeteries hide endless stories. Trends pushing society away from them are trash. For any and all of us, should we ever grow or not, to die is the one thing we all hold in common. And planting our remains back into the sod provides us the truest legacies to stand upon.