Just Because He ‘Loves Digging’, Digs His Own Grave!!!
Jimmy Kickham, an 89-year-old business owner from Canada’s Prince Edward Island, prompted a few raised eyebrows earlier this year with his decision to dig his own grave. Mr Kickham used his own Massey Ferguson digger, which he bought 45 years ago, to excavate the hole at his local church while his seven children looked on.
For anyone passing St. Alexis church in Rollo Bay, P.E.I., one afternoon last summer, nothing seemed out of the ordinary about the small group gathered in the nearby cemetery. The people were standing around, watching as a backhoe scooped up the red earth, and then lowered a pine box into the freshly dug grave. But what made this scene extraordinary, was that the man operating the backhoe was actually digging his own grave.
When Jimmy Kickham dug his own grave over the summer, he remembered saying to himself, “I may be the first, maybe, in Canada that’s done this.” The 89-year-old from Souris West, Prince Edward Island, took his backhoe to St Alexis church and dug while his family looked on. “Perhaps I’m the only one in Canada who has done that at my age with my own backhoe and my own family,” he added. “I was kind of proud of what I was doing.”
“I love digging,” Mr Kickham told, “Just one of those things that gets into your system. It’s just work. Money. No matter what they wanted dug, I could do it.” Mr Kickham told the process of digging his own grave was fairly swiftly accomplished. He and his family left home at around 6pm, and the job was done by approximately 7.45.
Kickham dug the hole five feet deep, put in the empty pine box and covered it again with soil. Kickham said he wanted to be buried the old-fashioned way where a few days before the funeral, the grave would be dug and a pine box would be lowered into the hole and covered with the Island’s red clay.
Kickham is also hoping that his family will remember him as a man with a good sense of humour. “The grandchildren will know that their grandfather dug his own grave with his own backhoe at the age of 90. So that’ll be something for them to carry around, won’t it?”
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