To those in the golf industry, Kathie Shearer has been known as the matriarch of the media centre at professional golf tournaments across Australia. The role came naturally to Kathie, the better half of 1982 Australian Open champion Bob Shearer.
Part of her many duties was to ensure golf’s biggest names fronted the media when they would rather be some other place. One such instance occurred at the 1998 Johnnie Walker Classic in Phuket, Thailand, where she had the unenviable task of enticing Tiger Woods out of the locker room after a mediocre round. How she coerced Tiger to the media centre has gone down in golf folklore… so, too, the manner in which she explicitly told Tiger’s American manager to go forth and multiply.
However for much of Shearer’s later adult life, she has been a civil celebrant in Melbourne, conducting marriages, funerals and other formal ceremonies. Which she describes as “to hatch, match and dispatch members of the human race”. The experience led her to write: Last Orders Before You Go. A book for the living; The ultimate guide to dying happy.
Death is a taboo subject many don’t wish to talk about. Hence the reason Shearer wrote the book was to assist people navigate through the complicated maze of dying while they’re still alive and kicking.
“Wouldn’t this time be a lot easier if your nearest and dearest knew exactly what you wanted, without having to play a game of psychic detective? That’s where Last Orders comes in handy. It’s like having a GPS for the afterlife,” she writes.
Raised in London’s East End, Shearer has drawn upon her own life lessons that began while growing up in a depressed post-war Britain. In a revealing chapter, she explains how her own idyllic childhood was shattered by the sudden loss of her father at the age of 12.
Last Orders deals with several uncomfortable topics that can lead to trouble down the track if they are avoided. These include the dire consequences of not having a will; selecting an Enduring Power of Attorney in the event one becomes incapacitated; choosing between burial, cremation and other alternatives.
Shearer provides great advice about giving a loved one a respectful sendoff. She goes into touching detail about how she handled her own mother’s goodbye – from organising the cremation, finding an appropriate funeral home to arrange a chapel, selecting tribute music at the funeral service and hosting the wake at the family home.
Throughout the book Shearer offers pearls of wisdom from 22 years as a civil celebrant. The best of which may be: “Love does not equate to the amount of money you spend on a funeral.”
She supplies a to-do list with basic steps to guide you through all the things to consider when planning an exit strategy. “So many times in this new job, I saw families unprepared, stricken by grief and not knowing how to manage the death of a loved one,” she writes.
Last Orders is a breezy read that can be achieved in one sitting. Shearer’s inimitable character and dry sense of humour is warmly conveyed across 105 pages.
“It was never meant to be War and Peace, more a little nudge for us all to contemplate our future,” she says. “I wrote Last Orders because I have seen too many people who reach the end of their lives, with no clue how to handle it.”
Last Orders Before You Go by Kathie Shearer ($29.95 + $10 postage from Ryan Publishing). To purchase, visit ryanpub.com
