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12/20/2004: "Cold Cold Ground"

There was a death in the night. I knew him, and I know his wife and son quite well. By mid-morning it was clear that we were going to have a funeral before Christmas, with a burial in the churchyard. Simon and I went out to locate and mark the grave for the gravedigger. It was twelve degrees and the wind was coming out of the north and west at a steady twenty miles an hour.

The cemetery is divided up into 120 numbered lots that measure twenty feet by eighteen. Each lot contains eight graves, ten feet long and four and a half wide. The lot number is indicated on a marble marker in the northeast corner; when the cemetery was surveyed these were flush with the ground but now they are overgrown or sunken. The ones nearest the driveway were marked a few weeks ago so we can orient ourselves when there is snow on the ground. After we found the first one of the appropriate rank, we reeled off twenty feet of measuring tape, poked around in the ground with a pitchfork until it hit something solid, and dug to see if it was the marker. And so on: eighty-seven, eighty-six, eighty-five. We were close to the corner and eighty-four was gone. We marked the spot where it should be, and veered off eighteen feet south and found the marker for the next row in that direction. Confident of our corner, we were able to find the appropriate grave, and set up flags at the corners. Then we went back to decorating the church for Christmas.