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…"
Trevor Crean, 22, would be the fourth generation of Creans to run the Kearney home (Brian Howell)
"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%.
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