The way of all flesh: sooner or later, you'll be business for someone like Mark Higgins.

• Author: Gray, Tim

Who are these people who ... we hire to face death for us? What does that do to their own lives--to grow up in a home where there are dead bodies in the basement, to be a child and walk in on your father with a body lying on a table opened up and him working on it? What does that do to you?

--Alan Ball, creator of the HBO series Six Feet Under

Mark Higgins holds a syringe with a barrel the size of a bratwurst. The tip of his tongue is lodged in the corner of his mouth, and the end of the 8-inch-long needle is sunken in the neck of a corpse. As Higgins bears down, a gel, called Feature Builder, sluices out of the syringe and balloons beneath the sagging, papery skin of the dead man's scrawny neck. Once Higgins has finished the injection, he massages the neck and face to spread the gel and hide the emaciation brought on by old age and illness. Beside Higgins, on the counter, lies a photograph of the old gent from happier, handsomer days. Higgins glances at it occasionally, trying to ensure that he doesn't overshoot in his attempt to create a lifelike appearance.

The green-tiled room where he works reeks of formaldehyde; a big whiff is just about enough to knock over a neophyte. On a second embalming table, a few feet behind Higgins in the smallish space, lies the body of another old man. A white sheet covers all but his head. Both died the evening before and arrived after midnight. Add the 7-year-old boy who's reposed in a parlor upstairs, awaiting his funeral, and it's a busy day at Hall-Wynne Funeral Service in Durham.

Higgins chats amiably, as he tends to, while he goes about his work. He's explaining the multistep process of preparing a corpse--how he siphons off the blood and cleans out and refills the hollow organs. "The mouth is the one thing that you have to get right. Customers will often say, 'His mouth doesn't look right.' Well, they've never seen him dead before. Maybe, he's been in a nursing home, and the mouth's been hanging open. Maybe he's had tubes in. A lot of embalmers are good fluid pushers, but it takes an artistic hand to get the mouth right."

Many funeral-home owners employ embalmers and focus solely on managing the ebb and flow of cash and customers. But Higgins likes to--here, he borrows a phrase from the undertaker-essayist Thomas Lynch--"go the distance with the dead," shepherding them from preparation to burial. Like the physician-CEO who still sees patients once a week or the university president who teaches a class, he wants to stay abreast of the front-line work.

Scorned or scary things often represent the best business opportunities. If you're brave enough to do something other folks fear, you can make a pretty profit; sometimes, the best competitive advantage is a strong stomach. One of the many ways that Peter Lynch, the famed former manager of the Fidelity Magellan mutual fund, bested competitors was by buying up what he called "grim stocks," including shares in funeral-home operators. These outfits, Lynch realized, threw off a steady stream of cash, but investment analysts and other money managers shied away because of the stench of death.

Lynch's insight holds as true today as when it occurred to him back in the '80s. Undertakers deal in death, but theirs is a healthy business. Higgins' company, for example, does about 450 funerals and cremations a year and generates about $2.5 million a year in sales, making it medium-sized. And his is a recession-resistant business that's impossible to offshore. In many markets, the industry still offers cozy niches for independent owner-operators, though they face competition from national chains such as Houston-based Service Corporation International. The National Association of Funeral Directors counts about 21,500 funeral homes in the country and says about 90% of them are closely held. North Carolina has 734, according to the state mortuary board. At a time when radiologists worry about X-rays being...