Exhumation of Brian Kagwa’s grave

The exhumation of Brian Kagwa’s grave is both a clandestine recovery of his body and a confrontation with the grief Apollo Kagwa has tried to keep sealed away. At Nassau Knolls Cemetery, Apollo and Patrice Green work through the night to reach the child’s casket. The practical labor—finding the plot, evading a patrol car, removing earth and concrete—ends not in relief but in Apollo seeing his son for the first time in four months and recoiling from the damage he believes he has caused.

The decision to go to the grave

Apollo does not begin the drive with any certainty that he can go through with the exhumation. He leans out of the Honda to listen for the prowl car, waits without knowing how long, and realizes that his hesitation may have another cause: fear of what he will find. To him, whatever is buried in the grave marks the farthest point yet on a newly encountered landscape of grief. He wonders whether opening the casket might make him go insane, burst into flames, or turn to stone. He nevertheless turns the key and drives down Revere Road at an unremarkable pace, careful not to draw the attention of local residents.

The decision is framed against Apollo’s thoughts about the heroes of myths and fairy tales. Those figures are often shown acting without an interior life, but Apollo imagines that real people must also have shivered before horrors and wondered how they could complete their quests. Their fear does not cancel their courage: they go on. The reflection does not make Apollo’s dread disappear; it gives him a way to understand continuing despite it. At the grave, the language of a heroic quest meets the physical vulnerability of a grieving father who does not know what opening the casket will do to him.

Finding the plot and preparing to dig

The cemetery is large enough that Apollo and Patrice could wander for half a day without finding Brian Kagwa’s burial place. Patrice checks its website, which provides a PDF locating the plot. They use the community mausoleum, a white building resembling a banquet hall, as a landmark: Brian Kagwa’s grave is behind it, with a road on the far side. The information gives their night search a practical route through a space that might otherwise have swallowed their efforts in aimless walking.

Their progress is interrupted when they hear the prowl car again. They stop and turn toward the fence. In weak moonlight, its headlights move through the fence posts and rake across the cemetery dirt; neither man dares even crouch. The car stops at a large opening in the fence, and they hear its window slide down. Apollo cannot tell whether there are police lights on the roof and wonders if Kinder Garten might be driving, but does not know how the suspected pursuer could have learned where they were. The episode makes the work feel exposed even before they reach the grave: the men must act under the possibility of being discovered, without knowing who is watching.

The tools make the undertaking tangible. Patrice brings a flat-blade shovel, a crowbar, and an ax; Apollo takes a heavy Mattock from a maintenance building and carries an iPad under his free arm. Its four-foot wooden handle ends in a two-headed metal head: one side is pick-shaped, the other a horizontal adze suited to hard-packed earth. At the burial plot, Apollo recognizes the marker in the twelfth row, ninth in, and the name compresses the task into one stark fact. The grave marker bears the name Brian. The pause around that name precedes the digging, making the physical work inseparable from the person it is meant to reach.

The labor of opening the grave

Apollo begins with the shovel. He presses its edge into the ground with his right foot, levers up the soil, and repeats the motion one step at a time. Within twenty minutes he has removed the whole top layer of sod. The clumps, which look like used tea bags in the dark, are easy enough to toss aside; the labor quickly takes its toll elsewhere. His arms pulse, his face turns clammy, and his breathing grows loud. Patrice watches, surprised by Apollo’s competence. Apollo explains that he and Emma Valentine used to watch home-improvement shows, a modest domestic memory suddenly put to use in the cemetery.

For the deeper earth, Apollo switches to the Mattock. Neither man knows its name, but Apollo intuits how to use it, turning the adze toward the rectangle of exposed soil and bringing the tool down hard. Patrice offers to take turns; Apollo agrees to switch only when he can no longer lift his arms. This arrangement makes the digging a shared effort, though Apollo keeps returning to it as exhaustion deepens. By four-thirty, he has taken over again. Patrice lies beside the open grave, apparently asleep from fatigue. The remaining soil is only inches deep, but Apollo no longer answers when Patrice offers to relieve him. His arms, shoulders, back, and knees hurt; he continues by willpower.

The grave’s construction adds another barrier. Modern graves are only four feet deep, rather than six, because sturdier caskets and concrete grave liners—the protective vaults around the caskets—help prevent the sinkholes associated with decomposition and a collapsing casket. Knowing this detail does not make the liner easy to breach. Apollo drops the Mattock into the grave; its pick end lands in the concrete and sticks. He wrenches it free, stamps at the liner until he feels it shift, and strikes again. Four blows reduce the sectional liner to dust. Beneath it is Brian Kagwa’s small white casket, decorated with antique-nickel hardware: handle-rod brackets, caps, and stamped-metal corners.

Opening the casket

Apollo searches along the sides of the casket for the seam between lid and base. He cannot bear to chop through the top, so he works the pick end of the Mattock into the groove and wrenches until the locking system gives with a wet snap. When he lifts the small lid, it catches halfway. He drops the tool, uses both hands, and bends over the casket in a posture of supplication as he heaves it open. Dawn reaches the top of the gravesite while the bottom remains darker. For the first time in four months, Apollo sees Brian Kagwa.

The mortician has done his best, but burn marks remain on Brian Kagwa’s face, and the skull shows at the top. His small body is wrapped in a light-blue blanket. Dirt and stones have fallen across the pillow, blanket, and body during the opening; what had been sealed away clean is now soiled. Apollo’s first response is not triumph at having reached the casket but self-accusation: “Look what I did to my boy,” he whispers. The line fixes the scene’s emotional reversal. Apollo has crossed the barriers of fear, earth, and concrete to see his son, yet the act of opening the grave leaves him looking at the damage from the dig and blaming himself for it. The exhumation thus gives physical form to his grief without resolving it: the casket is open, but what Apollo sees is both his child and the cost of forcing himself to look.