‘The dead can’t hurt you’: Behind the scenes with an LI gravedigger

The "no one in attendance" services are the hardest part. Sometimes it’s too sad for Curtis Credle to bear.

Calverton National Cemetery holds these monthly gatherings (abbreviated as NOA) to honor veterans who had no one present at their funerals. The service takes place at a chapel, with names read and other veterans and cemetery employees there to pay respects.

“It’s just so sad that these 14 or 15 people each month, no one attended,” Credle said. “You just don't want to go out like that.”

Credle, 49, is a cemetery caretaker at Calverton. He moved to Bay Shore from Washington, North Carolina, and has been digging and maintaining graves for the past two and a half years. He never pictured himself in this line of work.

“It was a little bit different, because I never did it before,” he said. “But there's nothing to worry about. The dead can't hurt you.”

'Check, check and re-check'

Calverton is a cemetery for veterans of all religions. It opened in 1978 and there are approximately 300,000 graves. According to Michael Rohrbach, assistant director at U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 70 percent of the cemetery’s staff are veterans.

This includes Credle, who served in the Army for 11 years, including three years in the Army Reserve. Every morning he wakes up at 6 a.m. to prepare for the day.

The cemetery caretakers gather for their morning meeting at 8 a.m., where they receive assignments. They could be sent to work on the line — which means interments and digging using heavy machinery — or backchecking, which is when caretakers complete an interment. This means raking out air pockets that gathered in the dirt, covering it in topsoil, and removing flowers that any animals had found.

“We have turkeys, deer, groundhogs,” Credle said. “We’ve seen rabbits out here."

Credle says you can never look over your work too many times: “Check, check and re-check.”

“First-time interments when we're digging on the line, we've got a map and we've got to make sure we're digging in the right location,” he said. “So say we’ve got 10 graves on the sheet, we've got to go find the grave we’re digging and locate on the map and make sure we're digging in the right spot. 

“From there, we'll count the 10 graves and the last grave, we look on the map and make sure that we've got the last spot.”

The caretakers check one more time and set up the backhoe to start digging. Whatever dirt the backhoe didn’t get, Credle shovels out. Throughout this process he’s usually listening to church music or R&B in his headphones at a low volume. One of his favorite artists is Mary J. Blige.

“It relaxes me and puts me somewhere else,” he said. “I just get in my own element when I'm working and it just clears your mind from what's going on.”

Three feet between, seven feet across

Credle says the job can be mentally draining. Sometimes he sees the same person coming to the cemetery several days in a row to visit a grave. “You never know what's going through their minds or how long did they grieve for and you just see all this and you just feel it.”

There are challenges of nature, as well: snow, rain, extreme heat.

On a recent weekday this winter, gusts of bitter wind pushed Credle as he made his way through rows upon rows of headstones. The graves line the land with precision: three feet between each headstone side by side, seven feet going across to the next row.

Without a tree in sight, the air is harsher in this particular section of 1,045 acres. But Credle, wearing khaki overalls over a hoodie, seemed unbothered. 

“When there's rain outside, we can't see. When it's snowing, the ground is frozen. We have to jackhammer the ground before we can even start digging because the ground is so hard. So it's a lot of adverse conditions that people don't even know about that we have to deal with before we even can dig.”

He can take the heat, though. “I'm from North Carolina so I'm used to 80, 90 degrees,” Credle said with a smile.

Helping the regulars

What makes it all worth it, Credle says, are the people he meets. He once spent the day helping an elderly woman locate two graves. She asked him to take her photo at both of them. “That just really touched me,” Credle said. “That melted my heart.”

There are also regulars who look for Credle each time they come to Calverton to visit a loved one.

“There's one guy that I helped and he was real grateful, and we exchanged phone numbers,” Credle said. “Every year he'll come out and say, ‘Curtis, are you working? I need you to help me, take me to that grave.’ I would meet him at the bathroom and take him out to the spot, and then we'll talk.”

Every time Credle digs, he feels other people’s pain. He approaches each grave as if he is preparing it for his own family.

And when he clocks out every day, he feels honored.

“You have to have pride to work here,” he said. “This is a high-visibility area, so you've got to want to be in the spotlight and shine because a lot of people are watching you, whether you know it or not.”

By Rachel Weiss

rachel.weiss@newsday.com@RachMWeiss

Rachel Weiss joined Newsday in 2016. As a real estate/living multimedia reporter, Rachel writes feature stories and contributes to and appears in on-camera video packages. She was the lead reporter on Newsday’s LI Acts of Kindness series.