“What have you two been up to?” she asked, smiling back at us, “you look like you’ve been up to something. Give it!”

Kylie made her way over to the car and gave me a big hug. I patted her very round belly gently and said, ‘You look like you’re ready to pop.”

I told him I was going on holidays, would be gone for a couple of weeks and it wouldn’t be right to stay in touch when I got back.

Our bodies were pressed together by the noisy crowd pushing in to reach the bar — I asked how I knew him. He maintains I said — why don’t I know you. It would become a running joke. 

One of Bren’s main fears was the pain he would be in, in the end stages of his cancer — for good reason.

The phone rang – it took me a minute to find it. It was Charles. He said Margaret had rung to tell him to come home. He was just checking that he really needed to before he booked a plane ticket.

When Andrew calmly and kindly said, ‘Brendan, looking at where we are today, we could be looking at about a month.’ My world crashed around me slowly, millisecond by millisecond,

Not being here for us when we would need him most was his worst nightmare, but I think it bought him peace to know we had people around us to support us when he was gone.

13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

Ours is a story with a cast of hundreds, many will appear in the following pages, some names and places will be changed out of respect for privacy.