WARREN (AP) — It’s often an early encounter with death that leads young people to become morticians.

For Victor Sweeney, the moment came at age 4 when he ran across the street to visit his friend, Robby.

Robby’s mom said the boy was still asleep and told young Victor to go wake him.

“I climbed up into his bunk bed,” Sweeney recalled. “And I’m trying to get him to wake up, and he’s not waking up.”

Robby had died in the night of a seizure from untreated epilepsy. Victor was the first to find him.

Distraught, Robby’s mom moved away a short time later, selling everything in the house, including Robby’s red metal bunk bed, which Victor’s parents bought and he slept in for the rest of his childhood.

All of it set him on a path to a life caring for the dead.

Now 29, Sweeney is a vital part of life in rural northwestern Minnesota, but one that’s disappearing from the landscape even as the need arises and the population ages. Morticians — some of the only professionals licensed to transport and handle dead human bodies in Minnesota — are on the decline, Minnesota Public Radio News reported.

Some 150 morticians have left the profession in the last five years alone, mostly to retirement, according to the state Health Department. Currently, there are about 1,000 morticians in Minnesota.

The University of Minnesota, the only school in the state with a mortuary science program, isn’t producing enough students to keep up. Enrollment peaked in the 1980s and ’90s when the U graduated more than 50 morticians a year. Now, it’s about half that.

Turning that around means recruiting and winning over young people to a vital but difficult vocation, one that society seems to value only in its darkest hour.

It’s an especially hard challenge in rural Minnesota, where the work involves responding to middle-of-the-night calls and long drives in sometimes-treacherous weather.

‘No. Gross.’

A childhood experience with death, like Sweeney’s, is increasingly rare, which partly explains why it’s so hard to recruit young people to be morticians.

Greater life expectancies mean young people don’t lose their grandparents until they’re adults and have already set their career paths. Many young people have never been to a funeral, and so don’t think about “funeral director” as a career choice, said Micheal Lubrant, a mortuary science professor at the U.

“The next generation might not be as religious as they used to be, so they’re less concerned with ceremony,” he added.

Youthful, rural, morticians are such a rarity that seven years after Sweeney graduated from the U of M mortuary science program, Lubrant still remembered him by name.

“Victor,” he said. “Yes. I liked Victor. He was the class speaker at our graduation.”

As a teenager, Sweeney felt at home with religion in a way his parents did not. He went to Catholic school and remains devout. He wanted to be a priest, but in the end did not feel a spiritual calling to the cloth. He saw mortuary science as a kindred profession and embraced it as his calling.