In Santa Maria, California, the Best Value Inn on East Main was run by a woman with pink hair named Michelle and her boyfriend, whose name I forget, who always wore a Jack Daniels T-shirt and a baseball cap turned backwards. A cat named Dusty lived in the lobby and often sat on the counter next to the shrivelled apples offered to guests for breakfast. The room smelled like stale smoke.

Not long ago on a sticky Saturday night at a comedy club in Madison, Wisconsin, the funeral director with whom I was having a drink told me how long it takes for the formaldehyde to replace the blood in a dead person’s arteries. He drank a light beer; the walls in the comedy club were bare brick and the stools were too high for my feet to touch the floor. The funeral director saw the challenge of his work in bringing back the essence of the dead person in the face by massaging the skin. He said the important moment comes when the dead person’s family looks into the casket and recognizes the person lying there, or not.