My dad and I kept a running list of ways we didn’t want to die. Being buried alive was always No 1. Whenever we learned about unusual deaths – accidents involving farm machinery, medieval torture, mobsters encasing victims’ feet in cement before throwing them in the ocean – we added them to our shared catalogue.

Most fathers would shield their children from such morbid fascinations. Mine, a psychologist, did the opposite. He saw death as life’s most honest teacher and ensured I wouldn’t meet it as a stranger.

Death was a regular feature of life for my dad, who was raised on a farm in Indiana. He was the second of four boys, delivered by a local doctor in the family farmhouse. His only sister was stillborn. Dogs got run over by tractors, barn cats met an untimely demise and slaughtered chickens literally ran around with their heads cut off. As a university student, he lived above a funeral home, helping collect and prepare bodies for burial in exchange for discounted rent. He observed that many people hadn’t known that morning they were putting on their socks for the last time.

I experienced my first death at three, when my next door playmate died unexpectedly of respiratory failure. My dad held my hand as I knocked on her........

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