Working

by Studs Terkel

  “They took me home. I started prayin’ and prayin’ to God and things like those and this. Oral Roberts, I wrote to him several letters. Wrote from my heart. Still I was crippled. Couldn’t put a glass of water to my mouth. The strength had been taken away. I prayed hard.

  “One night I was in bed and deeply down in my sleep, I heard electricity. Like when you take an electric wire and touch it. It shot through both my legs. Ooohhh, it shocked so hard that I woke up. When I woke up, I felt it three times. The next morning I could raise this leg up. I was surprised.

  “The next night I felt the same thing. The third night I felt the same thing. So I got up and went to the bathroom. I went back to the doctor and he said, ‘That’s surprising.’ Ooohhh, I can’t believe it. There is a miracle. This is very shocking.”

  What do you think cured you?

  “God.”

  Did Oral Roberts help?

  “Yes.”

  How?

  “By prayin’ sincere from his heart.

  “I was a nurse before, but I wasn’t devoted. I saw how they treated people when I was there. Oh, it was pitiful. I couldn’t stand it. And from that, I have tender feelings. That changed me. That’s when I decided to devote myself.”

  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.

  HERBERT BACH

  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. 79

  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.

  ELMER RUIZ

  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.

  He has dug graves for eight years, as the assistant to the foreman. “I been living on the grounds for almost twelve years.” During the first four years “I used to cut grass and other things. I never ha
d a dream to have this kind of job. I used to drive a trailer from Texas to Chicago.” He is married and has five children, ranging in age from two to sixteen. It is a bitter cold Sunday morning.

  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.

  When you tell people you work in a cemetery, do they change the subject?

  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.

  A gravedigger is a very important person. You must have hear about the strike we had in New York about two years ago. There were twenty thousand bodies layin’ and nobody could bury ’em. The cost of funerals they raised and they didn’t want to raise the price of the workers. The way they’re livin’, everything wanna go up, and I don’t know what’s gonna happen.

  Can you imagine if I wouldn’t show up tomorrow morning and this other fella—he usually comes late—and sometimes he don’t show. We have a funeral for eleven ’. Imagine what happens? The funeral arrive and where you gonna bury it?

  We put water, the aspirins, in case somebody pass out. They have those capsules that you break and put up by their nose—smelling salts. And we put heaters for inside the tents so the place be a little warm.

  There are some funerals, they really affect you. Some young kid. We buried lots of young. You have emotions, you turn in, believe me, you turn. I had a burial about two years ago of teen-agers, a young boy and a young girl. This was a real sad funeral because there was nobody but young teen-agers. I’m so used to going to funerals every day—of course, it bothers me—but I don’t feel as bad as when I bury a young child. You really turn.

  I usually will wear myself some black sunglasses. I never go to a funeral without sunglasses. It’s a good idea because your eyes is the first thing that shows when you have a big emotion. Always these black sunglasses.

  This grief that I see every day, I’m really used to somebody’s crying every day. But there is some that are real bad, when you just have to take it. Some people just don’t want to give up. You have to understand that when somebody pass away, there’s nothing you can do and you have to take it. If you don’t want to take it, you’re just gonna make your life worse, become sick. People seems to take it more easier these days. They miss the person, but not as much.

  There’s some funerals that people, they show they’re not sad. This is different kinds of people. I believe they are happy to see this person—not in a way of singing—because this person is out of his sufferin’ in this world. This person is gone and at rest for the rest of his life. I have this question lots of times: “How can I take it?” They ask if I’m calm when I bury people. If you stop and think, a funeral is one of the natural things in the world.

  I enjoy it very much, especially in summer. I don’t think any job inside a factory or an office is so nice. You have the air all day and it’s just beautiful. The smell of the grass when it’s cut, it’s just fantastic. Winter goes so fast sometimes you just don’t feel it.

  When I finish my work here, I just don’t remember my work. I like music so much that I have lots more time listenin’ to music or playin’. That’s where I spend my time. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke. I play Spanish bass and guitar. I play accordian. I would like to be a musician. I was born and raised in Texas and I never had a good school. I learned music myself from here and there. After I close the gate I play. I don’t think it would be nice to play music when the funeral’s goin’ by. But after everything . . .

  I believe we are not a rich people, but I think we’re livin’ fair. We’re not sufferin’. Like I know lotsa people are havin
’ a rough time to live on this world because of crises of the world. My wife, sometimes she’s tired of stayin’ in here. I try to take her out as much as possible. Not to parties or clubs, but to go to stores and sometimes to go to drive-ins and so on.

  She’s used to funerals, too. I go to eat at noon and she asks me, “How many funerals you got today? How many you buried today?” “Oh, we buried two.” “How many more you got?” “Another.” Some other people, you go to your office, they say, “How many letters you write today?” Mine says, “How many funerals you had today?” (Laughs.)

  My children are used to everything. They start playin’ ball right against the house. They’re not authorized to go across the road because it’s the burial in there. Whenever a funeral gonna be across from the house, the kids are not permitted to play. One thing a kid love, like every kid, is dogs. In a way, a dog in here would be the best thing to take care of the place, especially a German Shepherd. But they don’t want dogs in here. It’s not nice to see a dog around a funeral. Or cats or things like that. So they don’t have no pet, no.