The service: John McGahern loved life but did not fear death, the main celebrant at his funeral in Aughawillan, Co Leitrim, told mourners on Saturday.
The chief mourners were John McGahern's widow Madeline and his sisters Rosaleen, Margaret, Monica and Dympna.
Seven priests officiated at the funeral Mass, including the parish priest of Crosskeys in Co Cavan, Fr Liam Kelly, a cousin of the McGaherns who was the main celebrant.
"John and Madeline have been good and dear friends of mine for over 30 years now. Over the past few weeks we had some precious time together when John talked openly about his impending death and the arrangements for his funeral. He loved life but he did not fear death. He lived with the reality of death since he was a child and liked to quote Achilles who said 'speak not soothingly to me of death'. That was his way.
"John was completely at peace during his last days and never complained about his cancer or about dying while still in his early 70s. Instead he quoted from Yeats's "Oedipus at Colonus": 'Endure what life God gives and ask no longer span/Cease to remember the delights of youth, travel wearied man . . ./Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say;/Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day;/The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away'."
In keeping with the sentiment, Fr Kelly said at the end of the Mass that "John asked that there be no sympathising, no oration at the graveside."
The church was filled in excess of its 200 capacity.
In his homily, Fr Kelly said it seemed appropriate "that we should gather for this funeral Mass here in St Patrick's Church".
It was where John first attended Mass and where he learned to serve Mass, he said.
It was also where "he had his first brush with church authority when, as a small boy, he was denounced for rattling his beads too loudly during prayer. There would be other brushes with church authorities later in his life - and even though he was treated badly he never held any grudges or traces of bitterness. He was bigger than that. The church was, he said, his first book and he had learned much from it," Fr Kelly said.