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Gravedigger retires after 47 years |
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Written by DeadGirl
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Wednesday, 03 May 2006 |
COLMA Saturday, April 29, 2006
His job was really the pits: 47 years of graveyard shift
Steve Rubenstein, Chronicle Staff Writer
Jack Sala, who has put thousands of people 6 feet under, says they don't all go 6 feet under. Sometimes 5 feet under is enough. In this undertaking, you don't want to dig any deeper than you have to.
"It all depends on nature, the soil, the ground and the water," said Sala, the senior gravedigger at Cypress Lawn cemetery in Colma. "Every one is different. Five feet or 5 1/2 feet, often that's plenty."
For 47 years, Sala has dug graves at Cypress Lawn or has supervised their digging. About 10 folks a day go into the ground or into the wall. In the cemetery business, it's not a customer's depth that counts, it's his breadth.
A cemetery plot is 36 inches wide. The concrete crypt that encloses the coffin is 35 inches wide. That leaves a half-inch clearance on either side before the paying customer starts rubbing what's left of his shoulders with his neighbor's, which would never do.
On Friday, his last day on the job as supervisor of gravediggers before slipping off to retirement, the 66-year-old Sala drove over to the Acacia Garden section of the giant cemetery to supervise the digging of a new grave for a service scheduled for this morning. Two colleagues with a backhoe had excavated a hole about 5 1/2 feet deep which, Sala said after a quick glance, was plenty deep enough.
But the grave was too narrow, by about half an inch. Without measuring, Sala knows the difference between a 35 1/2-inch-wide hole in the ground and a 36-inch-wide hole in the ground.
"That's why Jack's the best," said gravedigger Carlo Caceres who, at Sala's bidding, jumped feet first into the hole with a shovel to dig out the extra half-inch. "We're going to miss him around here. He's knows everything."
It turned out to be a tricky grave to dig. It was the left-half of a double grave, for the newly deceased widow of a man who had died in 1988. The husband had been waiting 18 years for this day and now was not the time for mistakes.
To lift and lower the heavy crypt into the ground was a job for the backhoe, but maneuvering the backhoe close enough to the grave meant disturbing nearby headstones. This is a touchy matter in the cemetery trade. In the end, one headstone was temporarily tipped on its side to let the giant machine through, the customer being in no position to argue.
"People understand," said Sala. "We do everything with the greatest respect."
When Sala took the job as a teenager in 1959, many graves were dug by hand. It took two fellows with shovels three hours or more for each one. Now one man in a backhoe can dig a grave in 20 minutes.
Sala, a native of Sicily, came to the United States with his florist father at age 16 and got a job building houses in Daly City. But building for the living depends on the weather, unlike building for the dead. It's less-steady work.
"There will always be funerals, rain or shine," said Sala, explaining his career switch.
At 10 interments a day, Sala estimated that he has helped to bury nearly 200,000 folks over the years.
"You're helping people, providing a service," he said. "It's very satisfying."
A stocky fellow with silver hair, Sala is built as solidly as one of the cemetery's marble markers. He says he plans to spend his retirement growing vegetables, tossing bocce balls and tickling grandchildren. Eventually, he will take up residence in space 59, just up the hill from the cemetery office, where he has a standing invitation as part of the company's benefit package, but he hopes that will not be for some time yet.
"Life is a wheel, round and round, in and out," he said. "That's how it is. People come, people go. In this job, you see that."
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/04/29/BAGVKIHV3E1.DTL
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Taphophilia?
taphophilia (taf′ō-fil′ē-ă)
ORIGIN:
From the Greek words taphos, meaning "tomb" or "sepulcher" and philia, meaning "attraction or affinity to something, in particular the love or obsession with something"
DEFINITION: 1. An excessive interest in graves and cemeteries. 2. A love or fondness for funerals, graves, and cemeteries. 3. In psychiatry, a morbid attraction to graves and cemeteries
Quote Repository
“No real estate is permanently valuable but the grave” Mark Twain 1898
Shirtless and Sculpted
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