digging in : nowhere to go [claire molla]
digging a grave to one’s own specifications
i ask my brother if i could dig a grave on his property. he lives on a few acres of land. i turn to the internet for dimensions. i come to learn you may bury a body in a grave as shallow as three feet. my dad says he knows a guy who digs graves at the cemetery across from cherry hill. as a kid i would hold my breath while passing by in order to keep the evil spirits out. i have since stopped this practice.
right now there is a crisis of liveness and connection. i’m processing isolation, self reliance, community responsibility; days feel swollen with anticipation. i’m honing a type of endurance i’ve not seen modeled firsthand. a test to know what i am capable of. a practice.
i wonder how the earth is feeling about this change of pace. i hear about wildlife returning to natural habitats with less human activity to navigate.
what is the toll on the earth to receive my body back?
how do our advancements fail to keep up in times of crisis? i hear about people dying at such a rate that merits mass graves be dug. i hear about morgues lacking capacity to house bodies while funerals are postponed. i think about preparing my own grave. it could be a hypothetical grave for myself. or really, it could go to someone else, if they needed it. i consider how else we may be served by going back to old ways.
the impossibility of holding an awareness of our mortality grinds on me. i allow it to become a theme i revisit.
i keep coming back to performance that requires endurance. i watch YouTube content of grave digging the night before i start and one guy warns against overthinking it, “don’t think about how far you still have to go.” of course, i tried not to, but then again i really needed to know the weight of each shovelful of clay and dirt. wondering - how many pounds of earth did i pick up and throw off to the side? that is the weight that would be resting on top of me, if/when the circumstances were different. (maybe) i should start practicing with a weighted blanket.
agitated needing to keep busy and process at the same time. exhaust myself. measure my endurance. understand my will to survive. i wanted the task to do work on me. you know how a dog will tear up your furniture if they don’t get enough energy out? i might be one of those dogs.
i thought, this is one way to abide by social distancing. the irony of six feet of space. in reality though, you can get away with a much more shallow grave - three feet will do. i stopped at three. that is when i hit the water table and started to flood out.
we make choices for a reason, without a guaranteed result.
i like thinking about the time things take. the internet (there are some really lively forums on this subject) says a professional grave digger can dig a single grave in somewhere between two hours and two days - depending on ground temperature, soil composition, root and rock, etc. a back hoe, which is what is used for most adult graves in the United States, gets it done closer to an hour or less.
the pressure to be productive.
