[HN Gopher] Gravedigging 101
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Gravedigging 101
Author : joko42
Score : 72 points
Date : 2022-11-17 11:14 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (burialsandbeyond.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (burialsandbeyond.com)
| nemo1618 wrote:
| I recently learned that home burials are legal in most U.S.
| states. Gravedigging is hard work, but I think burying a loved
| one on their own property (with the help of some friends/family)
| is a nice alternative to a cemetery/graveyard.
|
| Also, here's a free pet peeve: it's only a graveyard if it's next
| to a church. You're welcome!
| treesknees wrote:
| Depending on how much spare land there is, and who will inherit
| that property. I couldn't imagine sticking grandma in a grave
| on the corner of a subdivision, or having any serious offers
| come in once potential buyers see a headstone in the back yard.
| mwint wrote:
| If you buy a property with a grave on it (knowingly or not),
| I wonder if there's any way to legally move it to a proper
| cemetery?
| IncRnd wrote:
| > Also, here's a free pet peeve: it's only a graveyard if it's
| next to a church. You're welcome!
|
| That's not correct. A graveyard primarily means a cemetary next
| to a church, but this is not exclusive. A graveyard can be
| elsewhere and not next to a church. Any dictionary will show
| this, websters[1], oxford learners online[2],
| dictionary.com[3]. Even wikipedia's entry for graveyard shows
| this. [4]
|
| [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/graveyard
|
| [2]
| https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/eng...
|
| [3] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/graveyard
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cemetery
| mellavora wrote:
| wonder what the homeowner association would have to say about
| that?
| kwhinnery wrote:
| Two fun facts delivering strong ROI for my visit to HN today,
| much appreciated!
| acheron wrote:
| _it 's only a graveyard if it's next to a church._
|
| Not true. You can have cemeteries with a church or graveyards
| not. There's a connotation of "graveyards" as older than
| cemeteries, and most older ones were near churches, but it's
| never been a strict definition.
|
| While we're on it though, "graveyard" is a recentish word
| ("grave" and "yard" are both old Germanic words but the
| compound word only comes from the 1700s). The Old English word
| was "licburg", meaning "corpse town". ("lic" is the source of
| the D&D/fantasy game "lich")
| thraxil wrote:
| I worked on a groundskeeping team for a small cemetery (in the
| US) as a summer job when I was in high school. Mostly, it was
| mowing grass, trimming weeds, cleaning lichen off stones (we got
| to use the power washer for that, which was always exciting),
| etc. There were typically only a few burials per month. We didn't
| do the burying; that had to be subcontracted out because it
| required special equipment and a lot of paperwork that us minimum
| wage schlubs couldn't be trusted to deal with. Where we were, the
| local regulations required that you couldn't just put a coffin
| into the ground, you had to put it in a concrete vault (probably
| something to do with the water table). So one of the companies
| that did that would show up with a truck and backhoe, cut out the
| sod, dig the hole loading most of the dirt into a truck but
| leaving a smallish pile there for the ceremony, lower the vault
| into place, set up the lowering mechanism, then clean up and
| clear out. After the ceremony, they'd come back, drop the vault
| lid into place, pack up the lowering mechanism, fill the dirt
| back in and replace the sod.
| ranting-moth wrote:
| I friend of mine asked to borrow my hoe. After me saying '?'
| and '!', then he explained that, yes, in the UK you dig a hole
| with a hoe.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > in the UK you dig a hole with a hoe
|
| (Pedantic Brit here) I think most Brits would say 'with a
| spade' if asked how to dig a hole and would use a hoe to
| break up soil, disrupt weeds, harvest roots, etc [0].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoe_(tool)
| yetanotherloser wrote:
| I think you're correct, but if you need to dig a big hole I
| strongly recommend a mattock. (Source: too much
| archaeology)
| irrational wrote:
| Huh, TIL that what I always called a pickaxe is actually
| called a mattock.
| mellavora wrote:
| you obviously need to play more nethack
| tengwar2 wrote:
| As a Brit, I would say the same. However it may be some
| specialised terminology - for instance the wooden beams
| that support the coffin over the grave before it is lowered
| are "putlocks", a word I had not come across before. So it
| would not surprise me if a sexton referred to a spade as a
| hoe.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| (going down a rabbit hole now. I think that's the right
| phrase)
|
| There are loads of sites that offer grave digging
| services or equipment (e.g. [0]) although none mention
| hoes that I can see. However, I did find more about the
| use of hoes to actually dig holes (coming back to the
| original subject): [1]. How could I have forgotten about
| 'mattocks'.
|
| [0] https://www.equipter.com/equipter-articles/grave-
| digging-too...
|
| [1] https://grasstrimmerreviews.co.uk/best-digging-hoe-
| uk/
| blowski wrote:
| I have a mattock for breaking up the clods on my
| allotment.
| gadders wrote:
| Mattocks are amazing. I've used them for taking up small
| stumps from shrubs as well.
| tengwar2 wrote:
| It's possible that the word "hoe" is rarely written down
| in this context. I wasn't able to find "putlock" in this
| context on the web, although I found a blockchain
| protocol where the name clearly linked the words "grave"
| and "putlock"
| culturestate wrote:
| A backhoe[1] is not a hoe in the gardening sense, but the
| colloquial American term for an excavator. You might call
| it a JCB.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backhoe
| willyt wrote:
| In Britain we just call them 'diggers'. JCB is a very
| common British digger brand though so they do get called
| that as well. We do have backhoe loaders they are
| machines with a wide flat shovel for scooping material up
| and moving it around or loading it into a dumper truck.
| You wouldn't dig a hole with one but most people would
| look at it and call it a digger.
| massysett wrote:
| The concrete vault helps prevent the gravesite from sinking.
| The coffin or casket will decompose, and there's a lot piled on
| top of it, and people and equipment go over it, so with time it
| can cave in.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burial_vault_(enclosure)
| smeej wrote:
| Maybe not the place for this question, but I've been wondering
| about it recently:
|
| From what I think I understand, cremation usually leaves the
| bones, which are then ground to produce the "ash" that goes into
| the urn.
|
| Why not just bury the bones in an ossuary? It would be much
| smaller than a typical grave, and that's what ends up in the vast
| majority of coffins eventually anyway (certain "incorruptible"
| bodies notwithstanding), so why not just start there and skip the
| grinding step?
| tengwar2 wrote:
| I'm a funeral officiant in the UK, inter alia. The traditional
| purpose of an ossuary is to save the skull and two femurs,
| which were thought to be the desirable minimum for the
| archangel Michael to work the resurrection on the day of
| judgement (hence the symbolism of the skull and crossbones).
| Most cultures don't have a need to do that for religious
| reasons, and either want to scatter ashes, or bury them in a
| very compact personal grave or vault (by vault, I mean an pre-
| constructed underground concrete boxes, which would usually be
| part of a row with plaques on top). An ossuary would generally
| be communal, so not a great place to visit for an individual
| family member. If it were private, it would be larger than the
| very small vault used for burying ashes, so more expensive.
| Hence leaving out the grinding step makes the remains harder to
| dispose of, and doesn't really have any advantage. Having said
| that, there are some cultures for which the bones must not be
| cremulated (ground).
| smeej wrote:
| It sounds like the history I'd thought I'd heard, and maybe
| even the terminology, for what I was trying to describe were
| way off.
|
| "Ossuary" sounded like the right word for "bone box," but the
| context in which I'd heard the idea was an old Jewish custom
| of reusing tombs. You'd put somebody in there, wait for a
| couple years until they were just bones, gather the bones in
| a box (which was what I thought was called an ossuary), and
| then over time store lots and lots of family members' bones
| in their separate boxes in one tomb. It made a lot more sense
| to me than burying each body in its own body-sized casket
| forever.
|
| I'd heard of early Catholic opposition to cremation and
| cremulation, but also that some cultures did it to mock the
| belief in resurrection, sort of a, "Let's see anybody
| resurrect _this_! " sentiment. I'm not sure about St.
| Michael, though. He's not traditionally believed to be
| directly involved in the raising of the dead.
| adwi wrote:
| Relieved this wasn't another Medium think-piece on SBF
| rockwotj wrote:
| Why do cemeteries have fences?
|
| Because people are dying to get in!
| KineticLensman wrote:
| I was once walking through a graveyard and someone asked me if
| the path had a different exit to the one they had entered by. I
| replied, "No, it's a dead end"
| gadders wrote:
| They're always in the dead centre of town as well
| #dadjokesfordays
| gumby wrote:
| The people in my town can't be buried in any of its graveyards.
| Why? Because they aren't dead yet!
| [deleted]
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| A twin-seat Cessna plane crashed into a graveyard this
| afternoon.
|
| Rescue workers, hard at work at the scene, have already
| recovered 158 bodies so far and expect that number to climb as
| digging continues into the night.
| limbicsystem wrote:
| I'll just leave this here: https://youtu.be/_fb33PrnxtA
| rockwotj wrote:
| https://youtu.be/Jdf5EXo6I68
| ShuffleBoard wrote:
| It seems _someone_ is feeling rather pessimistic about the tech
| job market...
| Tade0 wrote:
| My college friend worked part time as an undertaker - the pay
| was surprisingly good considering the options a sophomore year
| student had.
|
| He had fond memories of the experience - flexible hours,
| physical activity outside and nobody bothering you for hours on
| end.
| recuter wrote:
| My advice to you is to start drinking heavily.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| Could lead to something bigger. Joe Strummer from The Clash was
| a gravedigger at one time.
| jollyllama wrote:
| Though he never loved the shovel.
| mypastself wrote:
| I guess you have to make "working on legacy code" sound more
| appealing somehow...
| gadders wrote:
| >>In terms of practicality, before the coffin enters the ground
| the amount of earth leaving and returning to the hole must be
| considered - if none was removed from the pile of earth, there
| will be a large mound left once the grave is filled in. _If too
| much is taken, you've got a trough-shaped problem on your hands._
|
| I made this mistake burying the cat in the back garden. There is
| now a dent in the lawn where I buried him.
| poulsbohemian wrote:
| > I made this mistake burying the cat in the back garden. There
| is now a dent in the lawn where I buried him.
|
| General speaking, you can add top soil loosely over the grass
| until the ground is level, and the grass will grow through it.
| This is assuming a depression of only a few inches of course -
| will be harder to accomplish if it's more than that. That said
| - I once tried to smother some lillies by added several feet of
| dirt on top of them - they grew through anyway.
| kornhole wrote:
| I have never understood why people make so much work and waste
| around dead carcasses. When it is time for me to die and I am
| able, I want to get myself onto one of the hills around here. I
| want the condors, coyotes, and other creatures to have a good
| meal. Threatened animals are fed and my family has zero bills to
| pay. I know it is illegal, but go ahead and arrest my dead body.
| shagmin wrote:
| Also known as a sky burial in parts of central Asia.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| Don't forget about the towers of silence in Zoroastrianism.
| ciupicri wrote:
| What about dental or breast implants? Or pacemakers?
| kornhole wrote:
| Some lucky person will get my gold fillings. Those are my
| only implants.
| FeteCommuniste wrote:
| Put me in a hole in the ground but skip the coffin. Worms need
| to eat, too! And that way no one will stumble across my
| decaying corpse.
| aszen wrote:
| That is how most muslims are buried, no coffin just a simple
| cloth
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