When 8 inches of snow hit Chattanooga last week, the John P. Franklin Funeral Home had to postpone three funerals.
When Maine was slammed with 14 inches of snow two Sundays ago, Brooklawn Memorial Park in Portland just brought out the heavy machinery.
“The jackhammering’s probably the worst part of it,” said Todd Jensen, superintendent of Brooklawn Memorial Park in Portland.
In Chattanooga, however, the snow caused Cheryl Key, co-owner and funeral director for John P. Franklin Funeral Home, to cancel services, something she’d never done since taking over the 1101 Dodds Ave. location three years ago.
“This one just came so fast and so furious that we just made the best decisions possible,” she said.
And it’s more about safety of the deceased’s family than the work of digging the actual graves, she said.
“We and a lot of funeral homes will pick up the families and bring them to the service,” she said. “The vehicles that we have, they’re not all-terrain vehicles, they’re not SUVs, they’re limousines.”
While embalmed bodies lay preserved in their parlors awaiting burial, diggers at Forest Hills Cemetery at 4016 Tennessee Ave. had the added work of clearing away the snow and chipping through roughly 15 inches of frozen soil to get their job done – if they can find the plot they’re supposed to dig in the first place.
“All the markers were covered up with snow; all the cornerstones were covered up with snow,” cemetery superintendent Barbara Chandler said. “We can take a name off a monument and kinda go in some sort of direction of where to start, which is pretty good, but then you still have to hunt and peck a little bit to make sure you’re in the right spot.”
Chandler said the search can add about an hour to a job that normally takes about 90 minutes, so when bad weather’s forecast, her people get their work done in advance.
“We try to stay on top of all the other stuff so we won’t get caught with our britches down,” she said.
Up in Maine, Jensen said that, in addition to the jackhammer, it takes a plow and a backhoe to get through the snow and sometimes waist-deep frozen soil, but graves are dug even with snow falling.
“It is snowing to beat the band here today,” Mary Chick, office worker for Conroy-Tully Crawford Funeral Homes in Portland, said Tuesday. “We’ve had a burial this morning and we’ve had a funeral going on.”
Chick said her boss has worked there 23 years and he could remember only one funeral being stopped.
“We go, rain, snow, sleet, just like the post office,” she said. “We just do it. We’re from Maine.”