I thought about the sealing casket that night, lying in my nice-smelling hotel room. (It didn’t smell like death, I mean, which was nice.) Of all the white lies of the funeral industry, the airtight coffin seemed perhaps the most absurd: Even dead and artificially colored, pumped full of chemicals, we need to pretend we’re special. We’re different from the dirt! We’re not dust in the wind, or pushing up daisies, or going into the fertilizer business. We’re tourists flying home in a spotless vessel. As Caleb’s uncle put it to me, describing his job at the funeral home: “I’m just the travel agent, you know, making sure their bags are all packed.”

Caleb, it should be mentioned, finds this dirt-phobia equally absurd. His dream in life is to start a “green cemetery”: no embalming, no vaults, biodegradable caskets. He hasn’t mentioned this idea to his grandfather, perhaps because it threatens to undermine the branding of the funeral industry, which makes its living off keeping the realities of death as hush-hush as possible. Even ushering me around the showroom, Caleb was visibly uneasy, glancing back at the door now and then to make sure his grandfather wasn’t around. When I asked about the embalming room, he said it was strictly off-limits. He seemed reluctant to even point out the door, which was drab and signless, tucked away in the farthest corner of the showroom. It looked like the door to a closet. Over the course of my visit it began to loom in my mind, twinkling with menace. I imagined it concealed unspeakable things, like the locked chamber in Bluebeard’s castle: halved cadavers and peeled-back scalps and slimy pacemakers heaped in buckets.

I lay in bed, thinking about all this, which led me inevitably to Caleb’s hand snaking out of Mrs. McDonnell’s body, the bit of flesh stuck to it like pumpkin goop. I couldn’t get the image out of my mind. Likewise the calm, genial, lighthearted expression on Caleb’s face. Was this — sticking his hands into death — what had inured him to it? Was his job a type of exposure therapy?

I switched on the TV. Game of Thrones, which I’d never seen before, was on. It was some grim and pretentious business. A bunch of bearded dudes were trapped inside a castle, waiting to be slaughtered. Mostly they walked around muttering about how scared they were. Before long the bad guys, a motley crew that seemed to include giants and woolly mammoths, stormed the castle and began to bash people’s heads in like watermelons. Normally I was hardened to this sort of stuff — who could go to the movies these days without seeing the insides of someone’s head? — but now I felt like I might actually throw up. What did it mean that this was one of the most popular shows in America? Why did we need our death porn and our sealed caskets, too? I watched someone’s face get eaten by a dog, and someone else get juiced by a giant swinging anchor so that only his arm was left, then turned off the lights. It was dark in the way that hotel rooms are dark. I shut my eyes and tried to sleep. When I opened them again, I could make out the tentpoles of my feet sticking up under the comforter.

The next morning, after a fitful night’s sleep, I watched Caleb perform his real stock-in-trade: the funeral. The Wildes do 270 of them a year, but I was impressed by how seriously he took the business of grief, shaking everyone’s hands as they arrived and offering his condolences. I shook some hands, too, feeling deeply ashamed at myself: a perfect stranger, insinuating myself into the worst day of a family’s life. And yet it didn’t seem like the worst day. People smiled and hugged and even joked with each other, as if the dead person lying in his open casket were merely napping on the couch. The deceased was a Freemason—he had reached the 32nd of 33 levels, whatever that means—so there was a certain pageantry to it as well: The men looked weirdly aristocratic in their tuxes and sashes and white gloves, their tasseled aprons covered in druggy symbols. Some even had medals hanging from their jackets. There was an Amish family there, too, and the two uniformed clans greeted each other with hugs.

I tried to keep a respectful distance, watching the service unfold on the big-screen TV in the next room. The deceased looked realer on television for some reason, more human, the rounded peak of his belly sticking up over the casket. These enormous corpses! His jacket was a size too small for him. This touched me, for some reason, more than anything that I heard during the service — except maybe the weird fact that he once spent $10,000 on an accordion. The man’s father sat in the front row, and I wondered what it must be like to see your dead son. As a father of two kids, I could not imagine it. Terrified as I am of oblivion, I would never in a million years wish to outlast them.

This is not a farewell service, the pastor began, it’s a see ya later service. This — heaven and the dear departed’s eternal vacation there — quickly emerged as his main theme. He said he knew that the deceased was up there in eternity with his accordion, right this very moment, accompanying the angels on their harps. They were jamming it up. This sounded like something that could make Satan beg for mercy — harp-and-accordion music, ‘til the end of time — but it was hard to muster much Hitchens-like scorn. Life is fucking hard. People eat too much, and sometimes they die before their parents. Could you blame anyone for kidding themselves?

After the service, I watched Caleb drape a coat over the widow’s back and steer her to a car, steadying her with a hand under her elbow, providing her with a literal brand of emotional support, then saw him do this again a little later at the cemetery as he walked her down to her husband’s open grave. He’d told me the day before that one of the dangers of being a funeral director was “compassion fatigue,” but I saw no evidence of this. Tending to the widow’s grief, he couldn’t have seemed further from the cliché of the undertaker, the ghoulish thanatophile with an Addams Family grin. It struck me then that the funeral business, or at least the Wildes’ mom-and-pop version of it, might be one of the last hands-on trades in America. Computers can’t embalm people, nor can they console them in their grief, and you can’t outsource bodies to “skilled workers” in other countries. Since demand is high — is, in fact, guaranteed — there’s no need to create it out of thin air. There aren’t that many businessmen out there that do some good in the world, let alone provide an essential service, but Caleb was one of them.