If you've never been to an Irish wake and have only seen the movie version, you probably think it's just another Irish piss-up with few people round a coffin drinking pints of Guinness.
But you would be very wrong.
In my father's island off the coast of Mayo, people go to the wakes of their neighbours, they see dead bodies, they touch dead bodies, they take children to those wakes.
So even an ordinary life away from the medical profession would have seen 20, 30, 50, sometimes 100 dead bodies.
My father didn't want to die.
He was only 70.
He was a very powerfully, physically fit man.
But then he got pancreatic cancer.
And pancreatic cancer is one of those cancers that no one ever recovers from.
He was quite stoic about it.
