So far in my life - until 2008 - I had only lost one of my extended family. My grand mother on my father's side.

Leila Gluyas died in 1980. She had been diagnosed with liver cancer at a time when treatment of cancer was far more primitive. She'd had tests done at the Austin Hospital, but knowing her condition was terminal she spent her final days at my father's elder sister's home in Mitcham. My aunt and uncle moved to Canberra not that long after Grandma's death.

I didn't realise it at the time, but my father and his siblings knew it was coming at Christmas in 1979. Our lunch conversation that day was taped - ostensibly for my oldest aunt who lives in Canada and had visited in 1978. But it was really to remember Grandma Gluyas. When she was approaching the end, my Canadian aunt returned to Australia and passed the news in the morning she died. We were all in tears, but I seem to recall I handled it better than everyone else.

But I do have one regret. I never went to the funeral. I hated church, and that was probably selfish of me in this instance. Grandma was a very religious person. Whenever I stayed with her she asked that I say my prayers before bed. I did as I was asked but I was never comfortable with it. She never pressed it even though she could have, probably because she felt my discomfort. I really think that had she lived she would have got along wonderfully with my wife.