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The undertaker's son is kicking back on the front pew. Legs crossed, fingers laced behind his head, he's relishing a moment's reprieve from slinging bodies for his folks. Out back in the prep room, the mortician has one on the table and two waiting in bags. Upstairs, staff are poring over reams of paperwork—death certificates, obits, releases. Down here in the chapel, it's quiet. No teary speeches or heavy hearts scheduled for the rest of the day. That frees up Trevor Crean to drop his professional solemnity and talk like a regular 22-year-old. Lots of "like"s and "y'know"s. Lots of stories about scouring morgues for corpses like a Safeway shopper looking for the spice aisle. About heaving lifeless, reeking stiffs onto stretchers. And, toughest of all, about consoling the lonely widow whose daughter ("her only friend in the world") recently killed herself. That reminds him that he should visit the widow "just to see how she's doing."

As he's sharing all this, everything he loves and hates about growing up in a family dedicated to serving stone-dead strangers and their distraught families, who should walk in but Mom.

"Not to interrupt, but you know you have three retrievals to do, right?" she nags politely.

"Three? But…"

"You could put them off, but the morgue is going to close. And you could do them tomorrow, but I think you were planning on being away."

In a flash, Trev, laid-back dude, transforms into Mr. Crean, funeral director. He rises from the pew, back straight, chin up. "Thanks for the break," he says to me, fixing his tie and touching his gelled hair, "but reality calls." With his mom out of earshot, he again drops the reverent air to explain. "I have to go to the hospital—into that big, smelly morgue room I was telling you about." Then, bang, he's gone.

Things are hopping these days at Vancouver's Kearney Funeral Services, one of the most venerable establishments in Canada's mom-and-pop funeral business. It's an industry many had given up for dead just a decade ago, when consolidation was sweeping the sector. Back in the mid-1990s, several funeral home conglomerates, led by Burnaby, B.C.-based Loewen Group and Service Corp. International (SCI) of Houston, had scooped up 20% of funeral homes in North America and seemed hungry for more. Investors figured the time had come to agglomerate a scattered industry into a few Goliaths capable of leveraging their volume buying-power and centralized operations to haul in bigger profits.

It made sense on paper, but the Goliaths stumbled. Their cost-slashing tactics backfired. "If you think of the worst excesses of consolidation in the marketplace, there was no place it was stupider than in funeral service," says Tom Crean, Trevor's dad and a 37-year veteran of the business. "At the core, you just can't mass-produce death."

Jumping into the breach, family-run homes have staged a revival by adapting to customers' new tastes for their final farewells. Some, like the Creans, are downsizing from gargantuan homes to smaller "arrangement facilities," where the bereaved can plan services at their chosen church or hall. Others have gone further, catering to clients' every whim by turning their chapels into everything from a movie theatre to a hockey rink. Taking their cues from the lucrative wedding industry, funeral directors are increasingly transforming themselves into creative funeral planners. "The family homes have really embraced the personal side," says Suzanne Scott, executive director of the Funeral Service Association of Canada. "And the demographics are saying their business is about to go sky high."

The result? The Loewen Group is no more. SCI's share price has tumbled two-thirds since the late '90s. And all the corporates are losing market share to independent operations. Meanwhile, Tom Crean and his brothers now own two homes and a satellite office, and are getting ready to move into a new space. As Crean puts it, "We're whooping ass."

The entire business of death is predicated on a single, relatively stable number. In Canada, that number, the crude death rate, stands at 7.3. It means that if 10,000 random Canadians, representing a cross-section of the population, were rounded up on January 1, 73 of them wouldn't live to see the new year. Of those 73, roughly 41 would be cremated, their remains treated with minimal fuss. For funeral homes, cremations typically involve a basic, low-margin service, yet demand for them has exploded over the past decades. When Tom Crean started in the business, the cremation rate was just above 10%. Today, in British Columbia it stands at around 80%.

The shift to no-frills death rites is just one of many industry changes that's challenged the Kearney funeral home during the 100 years it has loomed over Vancouver's West Broadway. A mounted black-and-white picture inside shows the first Kearney home, once situated a few blocks away on the same street. Two-horse carriages are parked outside a wood-frame building. The surrounding lots are bare.

Since those days, Kearney's core operations have barely changed. "Retrievals" arrive by the back alley. Lying stiff aboard gurneys, the bodies are wheeled through the garage door, past a black hearse, a black limo and into the workshop. Here, an attendant navigates the gurneys around a maze of caskets, some of which already carry prepared bodies, others bearing the names of bodies yet to arrive.

Most attendants have done this so many times, they probably don't notice the instructions Scotch-taped to a steel door:

ALL BODIES MUST BE

LOGGED IN BOOK

PLEASE PLACE IN COOLER

UNLESS COOLER IS FULL

CREAM FACE

TAG DOOR

THANK YOU

Past the knot of caskets is the prep room, a bright white space lit by fluorescent tubes. A skylight casts sunlight over a sheet-covered body on the embalming table. Transparent rubber hoses protrude from either end, draining the jugular and carotid arteries into porcelain catchments. The fluids that miss the porcelain dribble into a rusty drain hole in the middle of the floor. Nearby is an embalming machine filled with a pink formaldehyde-based solution. The liquid, pumped in place of blood, gives the skin a rosy hue. Various sharp tools are organized about the table, along with four red biohazard bins, a container of "mouth fix" and a can of Alberto hair spray. Formaldehyde fumes pervade every crevice. Normally quick with a joke, Tom Crean falls silent here. A stocky man with a round face, he warns me to be careful about what I touch. This is where the dead are most vulnerable. Even after decades in the business, Crean's silent respect is palpable.

Rooms like this begat the first funeral homes. Up until the American Civil War, families generally prepped their own dead; an undertaker merely built a rough coffin and transported it graveside. But with so many troops slaughtered so far from their families, a need arose to preserve the bodies for what could be a lengthy trip home. Embalming reached Ontario in 1883, and by the century's turn, the practice had reached Vancouver, where Crean's grandfather was looking for a new line of work.

It was early 1900s and Tom Kearney had little interest in the death business. His previous job had been managing a store in the Klondike and calculating lines of credit for a ragged cast of prospectors that included Robert Service. But then he met a woman who laid out bodies at Green, Simon & Lamp funeral home. In 1908, he bought the home—simply for a chance at its fetching mortuary attendant.

Like his grandfather before him, Tom Crean originally had other ambitions for his future. That changed in 1975, when Uncle Frank, patriarch of Kearney since 1942, died of a heart attack. Crean, a year from finishing a degree in philosophy, had no intention of taking over—until Grandma Kearney told him one day, "If you don't take over the home, we're going to be sold to a man named Ray Loewen." Crean recalls his next move clearly. "I went out to UBC and told my professors I wouldn't be coming back." Within 10 days, Grandma Kearney died.

But Crean wasn't done with Ray Loewen.

Prospects for family-run funeral homes were grim at the time. The counterculture movement of the '60s and '70s had undermined myriad social traditions, and formal funerals were no exception.On the West Coast especially, cremations and simple ceremonies had started to outnumber traditional death rites. Meanwhile, real estate had appreciated to the point where even friendly buyouts required seven-figure sums. When, at 24, Crean first sat down to study the books, he thought, "There's no way we can keep on. We're through."

Where Crean and others like him saw an industry in trouble, Loewen and his American archrival, Robert Waltrip of SCI, saw opportunity. The plight of the family funeral home, after all, wasn't so different from that of family farms, family grocers or family pharmacies. People will always eat, get sick and die; it's how they went about it that was changing. Savvy businessmen might not be able to increase the number of dead, but they could squeeze a little more value from each corpse through merchandising, employing commissions-motivated sales staff to pitch extra services, leveraging economies of scale and streamlining operations.

The consolidators employed a simple model: First, they bought several homes in a single market, creating clusters. Then they slashed expenses by stocking each home with caskets purchased at deep volume discounts and centralizing hearse dispatching, embalming and other services under one roof. The executives brokering these takeovers made no secret of their intentions. In 1988, with more than 100 homes to his name, Loewen told The Globe and Mail, "The day of the old family funeral home is passing." For the next decade, his prophecy unfolded as promised. By 1998, Loewen owned 1,100 homes and 400 cemeteries, while SCI had expanded to 3,127 homes and 558 cemeteries.

But to finance their acquisitions, both Loewen and SCI slashed services and jacked up prices, to the point where the average corporate funeral cost roughly twice what an independent charged. In doing so, they undercut a reputation for heart-to-heart client service that the family-run homes they'd taken over had spent decades to build. Same-home sales began slipping—5% a year in some cases.

The growth of the corporates also gave rise to a vociferous band of detractors. The Family Funeralhome Association, a non-profit Crean started in 1979, became a persistent critic of what it considered dubious business practices. In 1989, the B.C. government heeded the FFA's advice and banned telephone and door-to-door funeral sales, until then a preferred tactic of Crean's larger competitors.

For Loewen, the centre could not hold. It filed for bankruptcy protection in 1999. SCI managed to avert a similar implosion, but it's been scrambling to adapt its business model. Last year, the company slashed casket and urn prices and focused more on selling services. Even so, Phil Jacobs, SCI's chief marketing officer, admits, "In some cases our prices are a fair amount higher than the mom-and-pops', but we're hoping customers vote with their wallets."

And they are; just not in SCI's favour. Dwindling revenues are forcing the company to shed assets. Its holdings now stand at 1,600 homes and 452 cemeteries. On a single day last December, it sold 30 funeral homes and 45 cemeteries. "They call it a sale of non-core assets," says Crean. "We call it the annual staying-afloat sale."

Crean, 51, doesn't stand still for five minutes before he's pacing around the home, checking on urn displays and huffing up threadbare red-carpet stairs that creak underfoot. He could probably afford to sit back and relax a little these days. This year, Kearney Funeral Services celebrates its 100th anniversary. But to usher in another prosperous century, Crean says he's tearing the old building down and starting over. "Business is just too good," he likes to tell people. "We need more space."

Kearney has kept up a steady flow of business largely the old-fashioned way. In 1978, when Crean took over, roughly 180 bodies a year rattled through the garage door. Today, the family's three homes take in 100 a month, he says. It's by far the biggest family operation in a city where one in eight homes is corporate-owned. The staff of 17 doesn't receive commissions for persuading grieving clients to spend more money than they should, and the Creans have managed to keep their prices comparatively low. Their reputation is such that when Ernest (Smokey) Smith, Canada's last living recipient of the Victoria Cross, died in 2005, it was Kearney that arranged the nationally televised service.

But while guarding a reputation built on tradition, the family has been gradually changing with the times. The growing number of simple family ceremonies that accompany cremations, which now approach 75% of Kearney's business, has rendered the chapel, embalming table and casket-viewing room of little use to most Kearney customers. Rising property-tax bills all over North America, meanwhile, have prompted Crean and many others to invest in smaller-footprint establishments. In fact, in mid-February, the Crean family moved much of its operations from the historic West Broadway location to a retail space in a high-rise a few blocks east. The new arrangement office has space for several grieving families and funeral directors to hash over every detail of the service. A number of local halls and churches have agreed to hold Kearney funerals, making the old chapel largely obsolete.

In trying to personalize the services to each family, the Creans are embracing a trend that many other independents have adopted to counter the cookie-cutter offerings of the chains. The path was blazed by one Brian Parent, a funeral director in Windsor, Ontario, who, 12 years ago, decided to offer people an entirely different way to die.

When Parent opened his funeral home, he turned to the wedding industry for inspiration. Wedding spending in this country has been rising every year (today, the average wedding costs around $20,000, roughly four times the cost of a funeral). He concluded that Canadians were willing to splurge on traditional ceremonies as long as they maintained control over the details. Paul Seyler, a New Orleans marketing consultant, has been preaching just that on the funeral convention circuit for years. His renowned session, "A $30,000 Opportunity in a $5,500 World: What Weddings Should Be Teaching Funerals," has convinced numerous funeral directors to rethink their business. Traditionally, funeral homes have derived the majority of their profits from caskets, which can run to $20,000 and more, and accompanied that big-ticket purchase with a few, inflexible package options. "Wedding planners allow people to pick and choose things and decide exactly how they want to celebrate," says Parent. "They let the customer customize."

With the Families First Funeral Home & Tribute Centre, Parent turned the industry's sombre image on its head. He invested heavily in high tech: a splashy website, big-screen projectors, even a full-time graphic designer to create custom guest books and thank-you notes. When it came to planning funerals, he scrapped all the customs. For a diehard hockey fan, Parent's staff decorated a room like a hockey rink, complete with fake ice, goalie nets and skates. For a dead movie buff, they installed a popcorn maker and lined the walls with film reels.

Today, much of the industry is scurrying to adopt the Families First model. With more than 700 families served a year, it's the busiest funeral home between Windsor and Toronto. "He's a complete inspiration to me," says Crean. "I'm trying everything I can do to make our facility like his. " The Parent-inspired touches include flat-screen televisions, a website and a willingness to plan oddball services heavy in memorabilia, from bicycles to gardening tools.

But as Crean moves to modernize the operation, he's had to wrestle with the fate of the property where three generations of Creans laid out the dead. It's clearly been a difficult decision, and he's sheepish when he reveals it: "We're going to put up condos." Even with the steady clientele, the high-five-figure tax bill on the property had become untenable. So, pending city approval, the Creans are teaming up with a developer to erect a 11-storey condo building on the site, which is near the trendy Granville shopping district. The new arrangement space a few blocks away could soon be all that's left of Kearney Funeral Services along West Broadway. "Can you run a funeral home out of retail space in a high-rise?" says Crean. "We really don't know, but we'll find out. Our focus is to keep services affordable, and this is the only way we can see of doing that."

Ballooning property taxes aren't the only thing worrying independent home operators. Many in the industry have been anticipating a surge of dying baby boomers, but that has been slow to come. The three big killers out there—heart disease, cancer and strokes—aren't killing people as fast as they used to because of better health care and prevention. Add the fact that Costco and a host of cut-rate online retailers have recently jumped into casket sales, placing even more pressure on funeral homes that count on their casket margins for survival. What's more, good help is hard to find. Even in salary-rich Alberta, funeral directors and embalmers topped out at $49,700 last year, not the kind of income that will entice young people away from the oil industry or high tech. Companies like SCI at least offer commissions and cushy benefits.

Trevor, the youngster, is well aware of these challenges. "You take the random person from the street and tell them to go down to the morgue, some wouldn't do it for all the money in the world," he says. "Well, I'll do it for 15 bucks an hour. It's not about the money. Some of us just like helping people."

Like his father, Trevor had sworn to do something else with his life. Yet here he is, expecting to finish a two-year funeral home director's apprenticeship in June. This will give him all the gilded parchment he needs to take over one day—if he opts to. But he's thinking about quitting for a while so he can figure out his life. "Y'know," he says, staring at the empty wooden lectern at the front of the chapel, "my dad could have a heart attack tomorrow. Or my parents could step off the curb and get hit. We see the most freak accidents. But at least, if that was the case, I'd be prepared." And one more Crean would—reluctantly but resolutely—dedicate his life to death.