At six feet, six inches, with a football linebacker’s build and a personal best of 465 pounds on the bench press, Chad Kirby strikes an intimidating presence initially, but once you know the funeral director of Love-Cantrell Funeral Home, you’ve discovered a gentle giant with a creative imagination and an enviable artistic ability, a talent he discovered when he was just starting school.
“I was just ate up with the desire to draw when I was a kid,” said Kirby. “When I was in class, I was always doodling. If one of my friends drew something that I felt was better than mine, it would drive me crazy to the point that I kept perfecting everything about it.”
“When I got about eight or nine, it started becoming a thing where my drawing really took off, and I started kind of seeing that maybe I had potential to do something with it,” Kirby recalls.
His driving force was cartoons and comic books.
“When I would get a comic book, I never got them to read. I got them to draw the cells. I used to get ‘Mad’ magazine and all the celebrities that they had in them infatuated me with learning to draw caricatures of people and learning to overemphasize things such as their noses and ears. You’d bring those features out more.”
During his early years, he had no formal art classes but simply relied on his eyes and muse to guide him.
“I see what I want to draw and I start drawing it,” he explained. “My sketch looks almost like most people’s finished drawings. I never used a lot of the sketch lines that most artists use to guide them that are eventually erased. My sketches are closer to most people’s finished drawings.”
Kirby dreamed of becoming one of Disney’s Imagineers, who are basically engineers of the Disney dream.
“I’d just stand there and watch the artists at Disney draw for hours. It was amazing to me how quickly they do the different pages as they’re flipping back and forth to do each cell of animation.”
He was encouraged by DCHS art teacher Walteen Parker, who would enter Kirby’s work in art shows that he said he never would have had the courage to attempt.
“She was a big influence in my life,” he said. “She saw the talent that I had and always tried to help me with it.”
“Watching him in art was like watching a Chad that many people did not get the opportunity to see,” Parker recalled. “Chad always reminded me of Rodin’s ‘The Thinker’ because he naturally always struck that pose. He absolutely lost himself in art; as a result, everything he did was outstanding.”
Chad majored in art at Middle Tennessee State University with plans of becoming an art professor. He was mid-way through finishing his degree when his grandfather Allen Hooper passed away. Kirby, who had not planned to carry on the family business, which had been owned by the family for 40 years at that point, came to a crossroads in his life. 
“It kind of woke me up,” he said. “I started looking at the numbers. The fast life of Murfreesboro and Nashville I enjoyed, but I didn’t know if I would always enjoy it. I made a decision to come back to Smithville.”
He switched from art business and finished his degree in 2000. A year later he earned his funeral director’s license and license to sell insurance.  At first it appeared his world of drawing was erased, but it wasn’t long before he realized he could use his talents for another purpose, mortuary cosmetology.
Chad’s job is to make a deceased person look as close as possible to their appearance before death. It’s a challenging undertaking.
“Because the blood that runs through a person’s veins is a different color than the fluid that our embalmer uses to preserve the body, the shade of make-up that they have used through their life will not look right. It’s up to me to find the shade that looks right on them,” explains Kirby. “The fluid that we use here is pink to give some of that pinkening back to the body.”
“When you’re doing skin tones and shadowing, an airbrush is so far ahead of everything else and that is something that I’d like to incorporate even more in the near future.”
“When you think of an artist, you think about his hands. You’ve got to have a steady hand, but I think the eyes and mind is where the artistry comes from. I certainly believe my mind is able to perceive things differently than others and my eyes look for, and identify differences in the proportions of a person’s face. I think that is the biggest asset of doing this with an artist’s background.”
At times, Kirby even has to be more of a sculptor when a deceased love one has a physical deformity.
“Unfortunately, sometimes we have people who, either through diseases like cancer, or accidents, have lost parts of their face. The family is distraught. They don’t want the casket open because of that. They don’t want people to gawk at their loved one. I’ve actually been able to go in with waxes and other means and recreate noses and ears, once even recreating the entire lower portion of the face of a gentleman who had been deformed by cancer.
“An open casket gives the family much more closure than it does if we were to just close the casket and say that’s all we can do. Of course there are those cases where it really is out of our hands and a closed casket is the only option. However, even in those cases, I still try to do all I can just to allow the family to view. It may not be quite enough to allow viewing to the general public, but at least the family gets to come in and they get that closure. That’s huge a lot of times to be able to make them look like themselves enough for the family to see them and have that time with them. I take a lot of pride in that. I try my very best to make it look absolutely as realistic as I possibly can.
Master embalmer Ricky Atnip, who Kirby acknowledged as the best, joins Kirby as the two men devote hours to a profession that they can’t leave behind when they go home.
“When we’re here and there is somebody here that’s lost a mother and they’re taking it hard, that goes home with you. Lots of nights you lay around and you think, ‘What can I do to make this easier on them tomorrow?’ What would I do if this was my mom? What would I want done?”
With the long and sacrificial hours the funeral business takes, Kirby spends most of his other time with his wife, Sheila and children, Dallas and Brylee. He dabbles some in his artistic passion, creating a mural for the nursery at Smithville First Baptist Church and designing a few logos for various projects including this year’s FBC Vacation Bible School. One of his last major undertakings was a 4’ X 6’ mural for his soon-to-be born son’s room of an old Mickey Mouse television short.
“It’s a poster of Donald Duck playing baseball, and there’s this bee that’s giving him a fit,” Chad describes.
Chad painted another poster on the wall after Dallas was born and started on a Disney castle in the playroom for his daughter. Then, life got too busy for him, and work still remains on his creative endeavor.
While Kirby once would have painted a different scene for his future, his artistic talents have not landed on the wayside. They’ve only been planted in his third-generation business to bear fruit in the lives of others.
“I think God had a plan because I think there is a great use of art here in the funeral business. I think it makes a huge difference when you’ve got somebody who’s got an art background doing certain things. It’s much better to have somebody with an eye for that.”
“It’s (art) definitely worked its way back into my life. I had to be woken up to see that, ” he explained.