~Depth for graves isn't six feet
SIKESTON - Being dead just isn't what it used to be.
As well-known as the phrase "six feet under" is, chances are you probably won't be buried beneath six feet of dirt.
Missouri law does not require a depth for graves, only that a minimum of two feet of cover must be above them.
As in many municipalities, city workers in Sikeston are tasked with digging graves in the city cemetery at Kingshighway and Murray Lane.
Over the last few years, employees of the street department usually end up with the task. "We just have more bodies, excuse the term, than the park department right now," said Trey Hardy, street superintendent. "It's just another job assignment that they get. There are people that mind doing it, others that don't mind doing it."
Joe Jenkins of Dogwood, who has dug graves for the Mississippi County-maintained Oak Grove Cemetery for the last five years, said he finds nothing particularly spooky about gravedigging. "Just another hole," he said - 66 inches deep. "That's what the vault goes in and the casket goes inside the vault."
City workers use a template to first spray paint a rectangle 8.5 by 4 feet and then use an axe to cut through the grass roots, Hardy said. "We dig it approximately six feet deep."
Jenkins estimated about 90 percent of graves that he works on have the casket lowered into a vault placed in the hole rather than directly in the ground.
"That's all done through the funeral homes," said Hardy. "We dig them and cover them - that's our assignment in the process." With the vault and casket in the hole, there is usually about three feet of dirt covering the top of the vault's lid.
"Then we kind of place the flowers in an orderly manner, make it look decent," Hardy added.
Parks division supervisor Jiggs Moore, who schedules grave openings for the city, said the number of graves dug by the city varies from year to year. "This year, for instance, they've dug six to date," said Moore. "Last year they dug 10."
The city has been responsible for the graveyard at least as far as 1907, the date of the city's earliest records for the cemetery. "Back in the late teens when they had the flu epidemic they dug a lot of graves - 1918, 1919," Moore said.
The city charges $100 to open a regular-sized grave and $30 for an urn-sized grave, a two-foot cube hole.