I don’t know what your idea of hell is but a trailer park in the middle of the desert is one of mine. Not that I have anything against trailers (though I wouldn’t want to live in one) or deserts (ditto). But the trailer park in Barstow where my father died ten days ago was faceless; in the times I visited I saw a live person maybe twice, despite the fact there were cars parked outside, TV antennas. People didn’t go there to live, it always seemed to me. They went there to die.

Barstow itself is like the last outpost before Armageddon. The only visible business is the Borax salt mines outside of town and the series of chain hotels, restaurants and retail stores that have popped up there since I last visited, in 1999. Today you can get a cappuccino at the drive-thru Starbucks in Barstow and buy a wallet at the Coach store outside of town. The old hotels, the historic Route 66 places with burning-out neon signs that read HO or TEL at night, with arrows pointing toward nothing, are dying too. Many of them were boarded up with no For Sale sign. The owners, I presume, are far beyond hope.

I think my father must have been in the same state when he died. He had systematically burned almost every bridge between him and other people over the years, and when his second wife died a year and a half ago, everyone figured it was just a matter of time. Like everything else. Given the ailments he suffered over the years — a collapsed lung, a stroke, two kinds of cancer, emphysema, diabetes et al — it’s amazing he lasted until he was 81.

He was cremated without ceremony. There was a will from which I had been excluded. Not that I had expected anything (I was amazed to find that they had saved some money and that the trailer was worth something) but my older brother and sister, who had to put up with far more of his grief than I did, surely deserved something for their troubles. They were with him in the end there, when no one wanted to be. I had no idea how easy it was to insult someone from the grave.

The first night I was there I awoke in the middle of the night and wrote myself a note: “You expect nothing and you get less.” I spent the next day helping clean out his trailer. Among his possessions I was offered a guitar, a Civil War era sword, some unpublished manuscripts of his and some pictures of my brothers and sisters. I took the photos and left.