Couple discover a love to die for
When funeral director Stephen McMahon first laid eyes on his future wife, embalmer Christy Goodin, he knew it was love.
She was eating a bun, he was smoking a cigarette.
“Her big blue eyes swallowed me up, a bit like the bun she was trying to eat,” McMahon, 31, said.
Today the pair will get married in the Victorian glasshouse at the Hamilton Gardens, just over a year after McMahon proposed.
But they say working in a Hamilton funeral home wasn’t the easiest path to wedded bliss.
Because of the nature of their jobs there was not much chance for romance to blossom. After about a month of working together, Goodin, 25, made her first move.
The pair went out on the town and Goodin soon learned that McMahon was far from a killer on the dance floor.
But she fell in love with the fourthgeneration funeral director and embalmer’s personality — especially his sense of humour.
The couple continued to work together for a year, but kept things professional.
Goodin said there were no longing glances over cadavers.
“A lot of the time we were actually in t wo different places — Stephen would be out the front with people and I’d be out the back embalming.”
They both agreed that it could be difficult to find love in the funeral industry.
“Saying what you do for a job — it’s either a conversation stopper or a conversation starter,” McMahon said.
But working together meant they understood each other’s needs and often unusual working hours.
A lot of their free time was spent analysing TV shows such as Six Feet Under, CSI and Shortland Street, which frequently dramatised death and funerals, they said.
McMahon said they enjoyed spotting different casket styles or figuring out which funeral homes had supplied hearses used on the locally made soap opera.
In the past six years the couple have rented five houses, bought their first home in Hamilton and adopted two kittens — Mac and Boss.