Cleaner way of working with a shared resource?

[Chris M. via Digitalmars-d-learn]

I'm working with mysql-native for a project, and have been using 
a single, shared Connection 
(http://semitwist.com/mysql-native-docs/v2.2.0/mysql/connection/Connection.html) among multiple threads. The issue here is that since it's shared, I can't use certain functions such as exec() or close() since they're not shared.

I've been doing the following as a workaround. It's not a huge 
deal to do, but is this the best way to accomplish this? Short of 
going through the library and making the functions shared myself 
of course.

shared Connection con = ...;

void closeDatabase()
{
    synchronized
    {
        auto _con = cast(Connection) con;

        if (!_con.closed)
            _con.close();
    }
}