CASEY - Farming and funerals would seem like a tough row to hoe as a combined business model.

But the Goodwin Family Funeral Home in Casey kind of specializes in thinking outside the box, and anyone who believes the savvy folks down there can't make a go of excelling at both would be dead wrong.

David Goodwin is the farmer, overseeing a few thousand acres of nearby corn, beans and wheat. His wife, Terri, is the licensed funeral director, tending the final arrangements for those who have strutted and fretted their final hour upon the stage of life. The two businesses remain separate, but cross-fertilization between the twain happens more than you might think.

David Goodwin, who majored in broadcast radio before going back to school to earn a degree in banking, finance and economics, does the books for both and also records the local radio spots advertising the funeral home. When there is a need for an extra pall-bearer, a doorman or some more muscle power in collecting the newly deceased, Goodwin is right alongside his wife.

"Even in the middle of wheat harvest, if we have a death call, I drop everything because the bereaved families come first," says Goodwin, 56, who explained he's become adept at

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the "Houdini act" of escaping jeans and boots and pulling on a sober suit and dress shoes at a moment's notice.

His wife always is ready to return the compliment, too, leaving the funeral home to scramble up behind the wheel of a combine harvester when hubby is short-handed on the farm. "Once, she combined the neighbor's stuff as well as ours, but that's OK," he adds.

"Dave said, 'Can't you tell those aren't our crops?' " recalls Terri Goodwin, 46. "I said, 'Well, they're brown, just like ours are brown. No, I can't.' "

But, overall, their symbiotic relationship works smoothly and a lot better than her husband thought it would originally when his wife seeded the idea of going in for a two-year college funeral service course in 1996.

She'd started out life as an elementary school teacher - the two first started adding up as a couple after they met in college math class - but there are funeral directors on her side of the family and the profession was interred in her genetic code.

"There were about 40 in my funeral class when I started and less than a dozen graduated," says Goodwin. "It's very tough." No tougher than she is, however. Before she even got to college, she probed her stomach for the job by eating a Big Mac lunch and then taking the opportunity to assist with an embalming at a funeral home. It was a test to see if the sandwich would rest in peace throughout the procedure. "Yeah, it did," Goodwin says.

Her farmer husband, meanwhile, reacted at first the way most of us would when confronted with the prospect of seeing your spouse up close and personal with dead people. But he says he soon got used to it and will now even hazard a cosmetic opinion from time to time.

"Terri prepares them (bodies) for the service, and that's her business, her job," he says. "But sometimes it's someone I've known all my life, and I'll say: 'That's just not that person, the smile is not right, the hair is not the way he had it.' I'm not afraid to critique."

And when farm families come to bury dad or granddad, they find themselves at ease in a place that understands all their needs. One specialist casket, the brushed stainless steel "Homestead" retailing at $4,400, features a farmstead pictured inside its velvet-lined lid and similar pictures running around the outside; you can't go home again, but you can at least take the image with you.

The casket is displayed next to two stalks of dried wheat, plucked from the Goodwin farm, emphasizing a connection to the soil that runs deep. And how many bereaved sons, just about to bury their farmer dad, can go to a funeral home and get an answer about whether they should apply more nitrogen to their fields? "That was a recent question I got," David Goodwin says.

"I told them 'Yes,' because, with all this rain we've had, a lot of nitrogen has leeched out of the soil."

The Goodwins, who opened their new funeral home in Casey in 2007 after six years of running an established business in Beardstown, like to do things their way. The interior of their 8,200-square-foot building boasts an uplifting decor, featuring a sumptuous color called "raven wine," and Terri Goodwin believes in being respectful but cheerful. Death is a part of life, and we should celebrate the life well-lived. "Like farming, it's all a cycle," she says.

Goodwin also is living proof that funeral directors can undertake a dry sense of humor, too. She writes a local weekly newspaper column called "Funeral Facts" and likes to note some interesting life and death observations, such as how the discoveries of early Egyptian mummies were so plentiful, "they were ground up and sold as fertilizer and put into medicines."

"Mainly, though, my column is for educating people about the funeral profession," Goodwin explains. "But once in awhile, I like to include a fun fact."

A sign near the funeral home door gives departing visitors a sense of the Goodwin view of the world: "The Road is Never Long Between Friends," the sign proclaims, and then adds: "Drive carefully - we can wait."

treid@herald-review.com|421-7977