Digging Up a Grave from 1996 to Prepare it for the Next Person

I just got back straight from a funeral and needed to dig this one quick, for the next day. It took me about 2,5 hours (with filming). The site was occupied by a woman, who died in 1996, 26 years ago. I dug until I reached her skeleton, established it's exact position (sometimes they are scattered all over or are not lying evenly horizontal) and removed all of the soil, just to leave a thin layer covering the skeleton.

This was a grave for one person, so there was no need to remove the remains. If it would be the so called 'depth' (for two caskets, one on top of the other) then I would need to dig out all of the remains, along with everything that was left of the coffin, place them on the side, dig deeper, make an additional hole for the remains, place them back inside the grave and cover with soil.

In Poland you can recycle a grave like that after 20 years had passed from the date of burial and the grave wasn't payed for for another 20 years. It is called 'liquidation' but we just move the remains deeper and make them more compact.

We can do this also with a grave that is payed for, but there's a need to bury someone 'new' in there. That was the case with my grandpa and cousin, which have my uncle and grandma stacked on top of them now.

The bones as you can see, look a bit rusty and are brittle. The skull has deteriorated from the orbits down, which is often the case, because the bone in that area is more porous.

Women crumble faster and easier than men due to lower bone density.
It is easiest to observe when comparing cremains. Old females turn into fine dust, while young men remain as ground pieces of bones.

The lady in the grave wore some kind of a synthetic sweater, that hasn't biodegraded at all. If it would be cotton, I wouldn't find anything and the skeleton would be all over the place.

The casket was made from chipboard (at least some elements) and was painted with oil paint, which would never be the case nowadays. If I wouldn't know the year of death I could deduce it roughly from the materials used. Plastic tells me it is fairly new but the glossy oil paint finish
is a classic 80s esthetic. I would say it was 30-40 years old (it's in fact 26).

As you can see I had no time to change and came straight in a hearse and my formal clothes on. I had the equipment stashed beneath the tarp by my colleague, who had also traced the outline of the grave for me.

After I finished digging this one I went straight to another cemetery to help digging another, deeper grave, with huge tree root right in the middle of it. I started the day at 7AM and finished at 8PM.
It was my third in a row 13 hour day at work. What a week.

CHAPTERS
0:00 Changing into digging clothes
0:10 Explanation
0:45 Initial digging
1:09 Describing the composition of the soil
1:47 Digging deeper
2:16 Making space for more dirt
2:43 Clay in the legs
3:22 Layer of stuff
3:54 Digging to under the waist
4:43 Tough digging in clay
5:47 Closing in on the body
6:26 Finding the remains of the coffin
6:47 The soil is getting loose
7:26 Finding the casket
8:12 The remains
8:56 More plastic and the heads of the casket
9:29 The skull and the axis
10:06 Preparing the grave for another person
10:48 This took a while
11:05 The Dead Man's View
11:46 Taping it up

Get to know me better here:   / mentalmartin  
Check out my place about Death:   / funeralparadise