Mike Sutherland likes to say he's been at work nine months before he was born.

His mother managed Hillcrest Cemetery — back before women were allowed to manage anything, he'll tell you — working there until she was 80 years old, when cancer finally stopped her. The family business had already been running for two generations by the time Mike showed up. He was the third.

A member of the Centralia High School Class of 1980, Sutherland found his footing early through a program CHS no longer offers: the Work Program. Students attended classes through midday, then headed to local businesses for hands-on work experience in the afternoons. Their teacher was Harold Womble, who taught practical life skills most classrooms never touch — how to manage a checking account, how to save money, how to show up. And then, at random, Womble would appear at your workplace to check on you. You never knew when. "He would at random show up," Sutherland recalls. "You wouldn't know." The message was clear: character is demonstrated, not declared.

Mike worked at the family cemetery. Not glamorous, not easy. "I dug graves by hand for a living," he says, and he says it without apology — even a little pride.

That foundation held. After graduating, he attended Kaskaskia College, but the family business kept calling. When someone passes away, families can't be told to wait. He answered. Over time, he built his way into every aspect of the profession. Today, the Sutherlands operate two funeral homes, a cemetery, and monument sales — and Mike's children, Amanda and John, are both licensed funeral directors. Amanda was the last class to graduate from the old CHS building. John was the first to attend the new one. John, characteristically, figured out he could finish his certification coursework online through Texas, worked in the business by day, studied at night, and aced his boards in six months.

Judy — Sutherland's wife of four-plus decades, a 1982 CHS graduate — handles the finances. "I've always been the crazy idea guy," Mike says, "and she's always been the money person." They've made it work since the early '90s, when she left a bookkeeping job at a car dealership to join him full-time.

For more than twenty years, Sutherland has served on the Centralia High School Board of Education. He ran originally with an agenda — a new principal had called him dishonest over a policy dispute involving his daughter's first-day stomach flu — and he's stayed because of something deeper: a conviction that students deserve to be treated fairly and not prejudged. He advocates fiercely for dual credit programs. Amanda used them to shave a full year off her path to becoming a funeral director. John did the same. "The kids just are not sitting through a repetitive class again," he says. "It's just the same stupid thing that they've already learned."

When people ask about Centralia, he starts in the same place every time: "We have the winningest high school basketball team in the nation." That tends to open eyes. But the deeper answer is about the weight of knowing people — really knowing them — over decades. Funeral directors in large cities often serve strangers. Mike rarely does. The people he helps are neighbors, church members, classmates, their parents, and their children. The Memorial Day services, the day before this conversation ended, with a widow stopping him to say thank you. He corrected her. "Why would you be the one thanking us? You trusted us with your most precious possession."

Last year, he bought a motorcycle hearse — a bike with a casket carrier mounted on the back — to honor his best friend of more than sixty years, who died of oral cancer. The week after he bought it, he tore his bicep off and couldn't ride for six months. He rides it now.

Faith, he'll tell you, has gotten him through most of it. That and the work itself. "If you lay your head on the pillow at night and you feel good about what you were able to do today," he says, "that's the thing." He's seen what happens to people who retire and stop contributing. He buries them a year later.

He doesn't plan to stop.