After 40 years working in the healthcare system Dubbo local Peter Woodward was burned out. Not ready to retire just yet he decided to make a massive career change – becoming a civil celebrant.
“I thought, I’m too young to fully retire and get ready to move into a nursing home so I’ll do something else completely different. I decided I wanted to be my own boss so I did the course to become a celebrant and ran my first funeral in 2018,” he said.
“At that point I hadn’t really decided if I was going to do funerals as part of the business, but a close friend said to me about 4 months before I graduated that he wanted me to do his funeral – he said ‘there’s no-one else in the world he’d rather have officiate his funeral than you’.
“You couldn’t wipe the smile off my face the first time I was notified that I was a finalist in the awards. I was just so proud and amazed,” he said.
But it’s the stories he gets to hear and the special moments he gets to share with people – whether it be bringing newlyweds together or celebrating the life of their loved ones – which are the most rewarding part of being a celebrant, he says.
“Because you spend a lot of time with them, talking to them about what they want in their service and you go home and write the ceremony for them, there’s a fair bit of knowledge you build up. And some of the stuff they tell you is stuff they may not have actually told anyone else about.”
Mr Woodward hasn’t only hosted weddings in Dubbo – he’s travelled up to Brisbane for one and had married another couple in a hay shed in Bugaldie, a town of just 144 people north-west of Coonabarabran; “my word, that was a very unique experience.”
“You see people at the other end of their lives too – there was one couple whose wedding I did who were probably getting towards their early 70s. They had an absolute ball on their wedding day, it was just the five of us.”
“I hosted a wedding out in Ballimore on the weekend and they were flooded out. They lived on a property and the wedding was supposed to be on the other side of the river and they couldn’t get to where the wedding was,” he said.
This content was originally published here.