When long-time hockey coach and baseball fanatic Paul Carruthers died last month after a long battle with cancer, his daughter was keen that his funeral be far more celebration than commemoration.

So she had his casket rolled onto the floor of the local ice rink, along with his goalie gear, a hockey net and a freshly buffed Zamboni. Instead of hymns, the crowd hummed along to songs by her 63-year-old father’s favourite bands — Supertramp, ZZ Top and the Bee Gees.

“My father was not a churchgoer and he spent so much time on that ice, it was like his second home,” says Paula Davidson. “It just seemed right.”

But maybe a little strange, given that Davidson, and her husband Shawn, run the local funeral home in Stayner, near the town of Collingwood where Carruthers lived all his life.

Davidson stresses that she didn’t turn her back on tradition altogether — she opted for six hours of visitation and the casket was central to the service, even if it did feature decorative corner plates with baseball images.

“My father would have loved it.”

She openly admits she’s among a growing number of baby boomers who want to send their parents off in style — with more party than pathos — surrounded by the songs and symbols of their rich lives.

There are so many of them, in fact, that starting Thursday more than 350 funeral directors will meet in Tremblant, Que. to talk about how to better think, and help families plan, outside the box. They’ll unveil a new website (www.todaysfuneral.com) and a national ad campaign aimed at getting people to talk about the end, even if it’s not in sight.

“It’s not to say, ‘Come on down to the funeral home and preplan your funeral.’ It’s to say, ‘Sit down at the kitchen table and talk about what you want,’ ” says Laura Sharp, a spokesperson for the Funeral Service Association of Canada.

It’s also out of fear that if things continue as they are, funeral homes could become little more than body disposal businesses. Approximately 1,000 funeral homes in Canada largely deal with more than 240,000 annual deaths in Canada, and that number is steadily growing.

“We tell the staff here, ‘We’ll do anything that’s legal,” says Brad Scott, general manager of Toronto’s R.S. Kane Funeral Home. “We’re here to facilitate whatever people want.”

That can include navigating the hearse and procession through a Tim Horton’s drive-thru for a commemorative coffee, loading a coffin on the back of a tow truck or handing out Mom’s favourite cookies with her recipe.

Calgary funeral home manager Sue Lasher was shocked to hear a motorcycle heading out of the chapel at the end of a service recently for a young biker.

“I was really taken aback,” Lasher says with a laugh. “But the funeral director had an open mind and encouraged the family to do what they needed to do.”

And Nova Scotia funeral director Norma Boudreau recalls how she brought tears to the eyes of one fisherman’s family when she propped up lobster traps and nets around his coffin. “They’re still talking about it,” she says. “There’s nothing a family could ask me to do that I would not do. Nothing at all.”

But for personalize prowess, it’s hard to top the Marin Funeral Home in San Juan, Puerto Rico which last month, displayed the embalmed body of 22-year-old David Morales Colon, in sunglasses and sneakers, crouched astride his racing motorbike for his three-day wake.

A wall hook at the front of Toronto’s Kane funeral home, most often used for religious icons recently sported a Harley-Davidson logo. One family even asked owner John Kane to lead a procession of mourners on his beloved motorcycle.

“People don’t have time anymore for the two and three-day funeral, they want celebrations rather than commemorations. They want services that are unique,” says Scott.

And, given that 56 per cent of Ontarians now opt for cremation over burial, it’s creating an increasingly DIY approach to funerals, directors say, with families opting for casual get-togethers at a golf course or in the backyard and then scattering the ashes around.

“Things aren’t getting too ‘out there’ yet, but we see a trend that it will, driven by baby boomers who don’t want the same thing that everybody else has. They want to do their own thing,” says Suzanne Scott, executive director of the FSAC, which is organizing this week’s conference.

“So we’re trying to tell people, ‘(A funeral) doesn’t have to be the 2 to 4 (p.m.), 7 to 9 visitation and a service the next day. It can be anything you want it to be.”