A slow sun began to rise in the east. Hours before the funeral we set off; if there was the urgency of a mission at hand, there also had to be time to dawdle through John McGahern's familiar landscape of lakes and lanes, the wet fields interspersed by stunted birch trees.
The local people of the small south Leitrim towns where he was an everyday sight, buying a newspaper, or nuts for his few cattle, knew him and loved him, but above all - and far more importantly - they liked him for his ordinariness and humour. It was they who waited along the road side in Roosky, Dromod, Mohill, Fenagh and Ballinamore for the hearse returning from Dublin.
Ballinamore was quiet on Saturday morning. A lone man was walking towards us. By way of greeting he pointed out there was a shorter way to Aughawillan Church. "I can't go myself, I've to work. I liked John, he was a great man, an educated man, genuine, no nonsense. I never read his books, but he'll be missed here."
The road to the church climbed slightly, flanked by wide, banked fields with long views of Corduff Lake. On the small rise stands St Patrick's, neither ancient, nor modern, but firmly mid-20th century. The Catholic church in which the young McGahern had prayed, and no doubt fidgeted as a child and later served in as an altar boy. The doors were open.
Around the side, the new grave was ready, neat and as deep as they seem when still empty. The headstone is difficult to read now. Schoolteacher Susan McGahern had been laid to rest here in June 1944 when her son John was still nine years old, not 10 until the November. For 61 years he had carried this grief. It had dominated his life and made him an artist.
Mourners had begun to arrive. Overheard exchanges had the usual "very sad" and "too soon". Two of the men who had published his books in London arrived. The size of the church encouraged mourners to take their seats early. The building filled.
The voices became a babble of sound. A woman sat down beside me. "Are you family?" she asked. "I'm not either," she said, "just a lover of the work. I tell my children - they're mostly grown now - stories just like his. There's so many people in Ireland who know the sort of lives he writes about. Only you'd never be able to put it down like he would."
She paused and glanced across the narrow aisle to three men. Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel and Michael Longley.
"What is it that makes them write? Is it intellect or imagination?" She paused and sighed, "I'd love to have, what would you call it? An intricate mind."
Those three great Irish writers sat not as writers, but as bereaved friends.
A fourth was also present, Tom Murphy. But there would be no eulogies.
Anecdotes were being exchanged privately. The babble continued. Ritual had been called upon. An Irish local funeral was in progress. John McGahern's extended family, his contemporaries as well as the younger members, including happy babies intent on play, filed in.
Outside, the cortege arrived and the priest, Rev Liam Kelly, called for an end to the chatting. Silence simply happened. The formal goodbye of a local country funeral began. John McGahern's coffin was carried in, stray raindrops appearing like tears on the varnished timber.
The middle-aged priest, a Leitrim man and the writer's cousin, articulated the dignity of the moment, the simple dignity that McGahern wanted.
No music, no elegies. There would be no speeches, no graveside oration. It was devoid of all pomp and rhetoric.
The service was both simple and sophisticated and abided by the instructions John McGahern had left.
"John loved life," said Fr Kelly, "but he was not afraid of death." He had also left an invitation - all present were invited to a lunch in a hotel in Carrick-on-Shannon. The journey there would move through more McGahern territory.
Before this, though, ritual was followed. Outside, the small churchyard was overwhelmed by numbers. At the graveside, the coffin, shrouded in purple cloth, was lowered into the earth. Rev Kelly began a decade of the Rosary, as requested by McGahern.
It was time to fill in the wet yellow clay that had been heaped over his mother's grave. A couple of men began replacing the soil. The light rain turned into hailstones and the men became a team of six - using four forks, a spade and a shovel. They worked faster, the rain and the sun played games.
After the lunch, the good-natured gathering began to disperse. My daughter and I returned to Mohill and stood outside the cattle mart which McGahern frequented and wrote about. On the corner of Glebe Street, the road sign points to Ballinamore and Fenagh and, in the opposite direction, to Dromod.
A shop had a book of condolences open on a music stand, and with it a laminated poster.
It showed McGahern, photographed at a window and he is quoted: "Art is an attempt to create a world in which we can live a world of the imagination over which we can reign . . ."
Further up the street, in another newsagent's, another photograph of McGahern looked up through the window. It was the back cover of the Leitrim Guardian.
In the photograph, he is standing in his shirt sleeves, the famous lopsided smile against a backdrop of lake glimpsed through the trees. The caption reads "John McGahern at home, at ease, at rest in Leitrim."
It was a coincidence, not a memorial. The magazine had been left down, upside down on the sill among a selection of newspapers.