Ephraim didn't find out his dearly loved wife, Lola, had been hiding something from him until she was cold and dead, and he was in the middle of digging her grave... What he realized nearly undid him.Ephriam and Lola cleaved to each other for over fifty years. Many of these years they shared in quiet affection, working their homestead farm on the distant world Athena. When Lola died, Ephraim set to the labor of grieving as he had always done. For every difficulty, he found work for his hands. Now while digging her grave, Ephraim learns that there had been one part of her which Lola had kept to herself, and learning this, he is forced to reexamine his own judgments and prejudices. He Dug the Grave Himself is an adult short story from Erik Wecks' Pax Imperium Universe. The other published stories are the twenty-two thousand word novella Brody: Hope Unconquered and the one hundred and two thousand word novel Aetna Adrift, both of which are available here on Amazon.