My father is not a mortician, a cemetery attendant, nor a gravedigger by trade, but he has prepared the resting places of friends and family nonetheless. It is the way of men in rural Alaskan communities where there is no funeral industry, and where volunteers complete the preparations for a funeral.

The first step in rural Alaska’s gravedigging is to find a location. There aren’t really any family plots in Dillingham, our small community in southwestern Alaska. We group graves by family when we can, but often there isn’t room in our tiny old cemeteries. Since there is no funeral director to plan the whole thing, graves are not dug in neat rows. Instead, Dillingham’s cemeteries feature graves that are diagonal to each other, cradled in the roots of ancient trees, or stepping down a hill slope to the beach. When someone passes on, men step up to dig the grave in whatever location the family of the deceased has selected. On the day a gravedigging begins, there may be five to ten battered pick-up trucks parked alongside the gravel roads leading to our cemeteries.

Gravedigging takes a team. A backhoe is used if the men can get it to the gravesite without disturbing the rest of any cemetery residents, but often the work is done with shovels and buckets. The grave is measured out, and then the men start digging. Because the work is physically difficult, the diggers take turns in the hole, digging until they tire or until the mosquitoes become more than they can bear. Then, they exchange places with a man above and take their break drinking coffee and discussing commercial fishing, the lifeblood of the region. In the winter, the ground must be painstakingly chipped away as southwestern Alaska’s clawing winds tear at clothing and exposed skin, making the grave the best place to be.

Three years ago, my father helped dig the grave for his closest brother. Rather than being a task too emotionally hard for him, my father took comfort in the opportunity to go before his younger brother and ensure that the final resting place would not be a home built by strangers, but by familiar hands and soaked with the voices of family. No one is left completely alone in the grave.

Because ours is a community of fishermen accustomed to a physical lifestyle, the work it takes to dig a grave for a close friend or loved one mediates distance from death. Gravedigging allows motion, the most obvious sign of life, to meet death and creates a moment where physical labor, the regular routine of our lives, touches death and colors it with normalcy. There is no clearer expression that death is a part of life than men who lend their backs and garden shovels to prepare a place of rest.