Buddy the Gravedigger
Everybody wants something better. It’s just a matter of getting it.
Born with a shovel in his hands
The only undertaker he trusts is his daughter.
Buddy scooped the rainwater out of the fresh grave with the same excavator bucket he used to dig the hole. It’d been raining for days and the grave was at the bottom of a hill, so the hole kept flooding. He and his employee, George, had a few hours to keep the water out of the grave before the funeral. This was at the far edge of the cemetery, near the house with the pig in the yard that gets aggressive whenever he hears George come through with the mower. Buddy is a third-generation gravedigger in the panhandle of West Virginia. “I was born with a shovel in my hands,” he said. I typically sit by Buddy in church. When he’s not digging graves, he likes to work on the church. It’s an old church, and he takes pride in its care. There are a few gravestones in the yard, and he’s dug one of those as well. Our small congregation has breakfast together in the church kitchen after service on the first Sunday of every month. The first time we met he told me he was a gravedigger and I told him …
