If winters were to Rusty White’s liking, the snow would fly in December. “The snow keeps the ground warm so that the frost doesn’t get down as much. It’s a problem the longer it’s exposed.”

This year, the now relentless snow relented long enough in January that the Cedar Grove Cemetery’s foreman thought he had dodged a bullet. But that was hardly the case. Now, a month or so later, the crew workers who are charged with making room six feet under ground have more than five feet of snow (and counting) above it to contend with, plus up to four feet of frost, to deal with as they create final resting places.

Still, life, and death, go on: Since Jan. 26, Cedar Grove Cemetery has buried 20 people, the interments a civic necessity, regardless of weather conditions. At the helm of cemetery operations is 60-year-old Bridgewater resident Harland White, better known as Rusty, who has spent the last 39 years in charge of ensuring that graves are dug properly and that everything else in the historic riverside cemetery of 19,000 gravesites runs in order.

While taking a reporter on a drive along the roads that wind through the snow-covered grounds, Rusty pointed out a back hoe and the half dozen workers scattered around it clearing about five feet of snow away from a burial spot before digging six more feet down.

“The guys are just digging around to find the graves. You can’t even see the headstones right now,” Rusty said, adding that crews run a jackhammer all day long to break through all of the frost to open a single grave.

Back in the legendary Blizzard of 1978, two years after Rusty started at the cemetery, Cedar Grove kept bodies for burials in the unheated chapel on the grounds, he recalled. Nowadays, the funeral homes hold onto the bodies – sometimes for months – if cemeteries cannot coax open the earth.

“This is the most snow I’ve ever seen in a short amount of time,” Rusty said while countering that he had seen worse with bitter cold weather. “It was really extreme six or seven years ago; I had to buy propane heaters to defrost the ground.”

While bumping along one of the cemetery’s roads, Rusty pointed at two plots next to each other, one with dirt still visible. “That’s Mr. Wood,” Rusty said. “We buried him and his wife within a week of each other.” He added the ground would soon be covered with snow once again.
The burials have continued this week, with six scheduled as of Tuesday, according to the office. They come in waves –some weeks, like this one, are busy, while others are quiet.

Meanwhile, there’s always non-burial work that needs doing across the fetch of the 70-acre burying ground. The greenhouse, where Rusty sleeps during the snowstorms to make sure he will be on hand to plow the network of roads, recently lost part of its growing area’s roof when it buckled under the weight of the snow. “That’s just something else we will deal with once it thaws,” he said.