Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (98 page)

Things that go on here. I’ve seen many of these patients, they need help, but they don’t have enough help. Sometimes they eat and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes there’s eight hours’ wait. Those that can have private nurse, fine. Those that can’t suffer. And this is a high-class place. Where poor old people . . . (She shakes her head.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I feel sorry for everybody who cannot help themselves. For that reason I never rest. As soon as I’m off one case I am on another. I have to sometimes say, “Don’t call me for a week.” I am so tired. Sometimes I have to leave the house and hide away. They keep me busy, busy, busy all the time. People that I take care of years ago are callin’ back and askin’ for me.

Plenty of nurses don’t care. If they get the money, forget it. They talk like that all the time. They say to me, “You still here?” I say, “Yes.” “Oh, you still worry about that old woman.” I say, “That’s why she pays me, to worry about her.” Most of the nurses have feelings.

If I had power in this country, first thing I’d do in nursing homes, I would hire someone that pretended to be sick. ‘Cause that’s the only way you know what’s goin’ on. I would have government nursing homes. Free care for everybody. Those hospitals that charge too much money and you don’t have insurance and they don’t accept you, I would change that —overnight.

Things so bad for old people today—if I could afford to buy a few buildings, I would have that to fall on. You got to be independent. So you don’t have to run there and there and there in your old age. They don’t have enough income. I don’t want to be like that.

An elderly person is a return back to babyhood. It give you a feeling how when you were a teen-ager, you’re adult, you think you’re strong and gay, and you return back to babyhood. The person doesn’t know what’s happening. But you take care of the person, you can see the difference. It makes you sad, because if you live long enough, you figure you will be the same.

 

 

POSTSCRIPT:
A few months after this conversation, her “baby” died.

We are called memorial counselors. We use telephone solicitation. We use direct mail. We put ads in papers. In any kind of field you look in the haystack for needles.

We call ourselves the Interment Industry. The funeral industry is a little bit different. You conduct a funeral, it takes one or two or three days, and that’s the end of that. But we’re responsible for fifty, a hundred, two hundred years. People will come in and say, “Where is my great-grandfather?” If you don’t have a record of that, we’re in trouble.

We’re in a creative field. We get into engineering, into landscaping, into purchasing for flowers. We get into contracting and road building. We cover areas from working with a bereaved family to dropping a sewer thirty feet into the ground so it will properly drain. Oh yes, there have been significant changes in cemetery management.

In the old days the cemetery was strictly a burial ground. When somebody died, they would dispose of the remains. They left it to each family to put in some sort of tombstone. Today the cemetery is a community institution. It should be a thing of beauty, a thing of dignity.

In the old days the cemetery served a simple purpose. Today we think of it in terms of ecology. Green acres in the center of residential and commercial areas, newly built. We have 160 acres here. Around us are industrial parks. Still, we have this green . . . The cemetery field has become professionalized.

In the old days each little church, each little synagogue, would buy a piece of land, and the sexton would keep the records of who and what was buried where. There was no landscape design, there were no roads, there was no draining. Our landscaper does the annual World Flower Show. One of our architects had done the Seagram Building. We use forward-thinking people who make the cemetery serve the whole community.

The olden days, the maintenance of the cemetery was left to the individual family. One family would pay and the others didn’t. You would have weeds in one area and someplace else cared for. Today, in a modern cemetery, you have trust funds. Whenever a family purchases, a part of that money is put into a trust. This trust is inviolate. In this state it’s held by a third party, a bank. You know that cemetery is gonna be cared for.

We have eliminated tombstones and monuments. We use level bronze memorials. You get away from this thing of a marble orchard—and the depression of cold, cold stone. What you see are shrubs and flowers and trees. The beauty represents something for the entire community.

We are only fifteen years old and our trustee has close to a million dollars to help pay for the maintenance. When the park is complete, the trust will run between twelve and fourteen million dollars. Only the interest can be used. So we put in works of art.

I am not a grief psychologist. (Laughs.) I think death is a personal thing. We feel we have to do something to help people overcome their grief. At every interment service we erect a chapel tent. We have an outdoor chapel. We call it the Chapel in the Woods. We hold annual memorial services. So the family knows—even if they don’t come to the service—their loved ones are being remembered. We have a lowering device—the casket is put on that——covered with green. So people don’t see the bare hole in the ground, which is very traumatic.
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Funerals are more restrained today. In the past people got very, very emotional. Today there is a dignity to the service. They don’t have to get emotional. They don’t have to do the kind of thing they did in the past to show everybody how much they loved the one that went away. The one big thing at the time of death is the guilt complex. We always felt we haven’t done enough for the person who passed away. So we try to overcome this at the time of death.

One of the big things people say at the time of death is: “Oh, I loved him so much. I want him to get the very best.” I want to get the finest of this and the finest of that. They are subjected to emotional overspending. At the funeral chapel they’ll buy the casket they can’t afford. At the cemetery they’ll buy the interment space they can’t afford. We try to avoid that. We say it should be planned, like you plan life insurance. You wouldn’t drive a car without automobile insurance. You wouldn’t move into a house without fire insurance. Why not memorial insurance?

They can budget it over a period of time. If people don’t budget, they have to pay cash, right? If you don’t pay for a refrigerator, they can repossess it. If somebody passes away and you make an interment, you can’t very well repossess the body. (Laughs.) So they have to pay cash here in advance. It’s a matter of budgeting.

Not anybody can be a gravedigger. You can dig a hole any way they come. A gravedigger, you have to make a neat job. I had a fella once, he wanted to see a grave. He was a fella that digged sewers. He was impressed when he seen me diggin’ this grave—how square and how perfect it was. A human body is goin’ into this grave. That’s why you need skill when you’re gonna dig a grave.

 

 

The gravedigger today, they have to be somebody to operate a machine. You just use a shovel to push the dirt loose. Otherwise you don’t use ‘em. We’re tryin’ a new machine, a ground hog. This machine is supposed to go through heavy frost. It do very good job so far. When the weather is mild, like fifteen degrees above zero, you can do it very easy.

But when the weather is below zero, believe me, you just really workin’ hard. I have to use a mask. Your skin hurts so much when it’s cold—like you put a hot flame near your face. I’m talkin’ about two, three hours standin’ outside. You have to wear a mask, otherwise you can’t stand it at all.

Last year we had a frost up to thirty-five inches deep, from the ground down. That was difficult to have a funeral. The frost and cement, it’s almost the same thing. I believe cement would break easier than frost. Cement is real solid, but when you hit ‘em they just crack. The frost, you just hit ’em and they won’t give up that easy. Last year we had to use an air hammer when we had thirty-five inches frost.

The most graves I dig is about six, seven a day. This is in the summer. In the winter it’s a little difficult. In the winter you have four funerals, that’s a pretty busy day.

I been workin’ kinda hard with this snow. We use charcoal heaters, it’s the same charcoal you use to make barbeque ribs or hot dogs. I go and mark where the grave is gonna be tomorrow and put a layer of charcoal the same size of a box. And this fifteen inches of frost will be completely melt by tomorrow morning. I start early, about seven o’clock in the morning, and I have the park cleaned before the funeral. We have two funerals for tomorrow, eleven and one ’. That’s my life.

In the old days it was supposed to be four men. Two on each end with a rope, keep lowerin’ little by little. I imagine that was kinda hard, because I imagine some fellas must weigh two hundred pounds, and I can feel that weight. We had a burial about five years ago, a fella that weighed four hundred pounds. He didn’t fit on the lowerin’ device. We had a big machine tractor that we coulda used, but that woulda looked kinda bad, because lowerin’ a casket with a tractor is like lowerin’ anything. You have to respect . . . We did it by hand. There were about a half a dozen men.

The grave will be covered in less than two minutes, complete. We just open the hoppers with the right amount of earth. We just press it and then we lay out a layer of black earth. Then we put the sod that belongs there. After a couple of weeks you wouldn’t know it’s a grave there. It’s complete flat. Very rarely you see a grave that is sunk.

To dig a grave would take from an hour and a half to an hour and forty-five minutes. Only two fellas do it. The operator of the ground hog or back hoe and the other fella, with the trailer, where we put the earth.

When the boss is gone I have to take care of everything myself. That includes givin’ orders to the fellas and layin’ graves and so on. They make it hard for me when the fellas won’t show. Like this new fella we have. He’s just great but he’s not very dependable. He miss a lot. This fella, he’s about twenty-four years old. I’m the only one that really knows how to operate that machine.

I usually tell ‘em I’m a caretaker. I don’t think the name sound as bad. I have to look at the park, so after the day’s over that everything’s closed, that nobody do damage to the park. Some occasions some people just come and steal and loot and do bad things in the park, destroy some things. I believe it would be some young fellas. A man with responsibility, he wouldn’t do things like that. Finally we had to put up some gates and close’em at sundown. Before, we didn’t, no. We have a fence of roses. Always in cars you can come after sundown.

 

 

Some, they want to know. Especially Spanish people who come from Mexico. They ask me if it is true that when we bury somebody we dig’em out in four, five years and replace ’em with another one. I tell ’em no. When these people is buried, he’s buried here for life.

It’s like a trade. It’s the same as a mechanic or a doctor. You have to present your job correct, it’s like an operation. If you don’t know where to make the cut, you’re not gonna have a success. The same thing here. You have to have a little skill. I’m not talkin’ about college or anything like that. Myself, I didn’t have no grade school, but you have to know what you’re doin’. You have some fellas been up for many years and still don’t know whether they’re comin’ or goin’. I feel proud when everything became smooth and when Mr. Bach congratulate us. Four years ago, when the foreman had a heart attack, I took over. That was a real rough year for myself. I had to dig the graves and I had to show the fellas what to do.