8 Grave Digger
“Grave digger, when you dig my grave, will you make it shallow so I can feel the rain?” If you listen to Dave Mathews’ song of the same name, you realize just how depressing the job of the man who digs holes in the ground daily for the deceased must truly be.
If you have ever dug a whole of any significant depth, you know that after you remove the initial soft Earth, the deeper layers are more rock than soil, a fact that any digger of ditches is all too familiar with.
There are many factors that make this job all around miserable; a monotonous task (digging), repeated incessantly with seemingly little fulfillment unless you really enjoy digging. The men that choose this life surely have more blisters that have bulged, popped, and healed over the years than we can imagine and calluses like rocks, but it is the mental aspect of the job that has to be most grating.
Whether or not the grave digger observes the funeral, they are aware that every hole they dig is destined for a soul that has already passed on. I have never met a grave digger and am not going to play Dr. Freud, but I would imagine constant theme of mortality in one’s job could have a profound effect on one’s daily outlook. Considering a digger can make as little as $16,000 annually depending on their amount of work and place of employment, it is not exactly a job that high school and college graduates are clamoring for.
Like a mortuary employee, it takes an especially tough and strong minded person to work as a grave digger, and this type of work is not for the rosy-minded.
