The Zen of Digging a Grave

We buried the family cat last night.

Usually, when people say they’ve buried someone they love, they mean they paid the internment bill for someone else to do it. This time, I mean we put shovel to dirt and dug the grave. With pick and shovel, my brother-in-law and I disturbed the earth in the middle of the night, by flashlight. My wife and her mother looked on.

Have you ever dug a hole? Sell your Bowmaster on Ebay. Cancel the gym membership you never use. Forget all the exercises you learned in high school PE class. If you want a little fitness, go into your back yard and dig a hole. It doesn’t matter how deep, just keep going until you can’t anymore, then fill it back in. Do that once a week and you won’t have to worry about how much your fat ass sits around the house doing nothing the other six days.

Add to that the fact that the hole you’re digging will be the final resting place for a loved one, and you have a new sort of labor altogether. All of the emotions of death are involved. There’s the pain, the relief, the happiness and sadness, the love and anger, the guilt. All those things you feel, conflicting or not, when someone you love leaves you. This time, however, they’re directed at a hole in the ground rather than yourself. You can put them in the ground and bury them there instead of in your heart. It’s a far more suitable place for them.

I may have cheated myself in a way. In the future, I will have to bury a person I love. In all likelihood, I will have to do it the way most of us do: I’ll pay the fee and let the professionals handle it. I’ll be cheated because all I’ll be able to do is watch, helplessly, while life runs its course independently of my own exertion.

I’ll have nowhere else to bury my emotions than under the soil of my soul.