Icy rain ensured that yesterday felt like deepest winter. Mourners gathered outside the graveyard gates waiting for the hearse carrying writer Benedict Kiely home to Omagh town and agreed it was a great day for a funeral. Many sets of eyes scanned the road. One man said the funeral party had phoned from Monaghan town.
"But that was more than an hour ago, and there's still no sign." It was cold, some waited by the small caretaker's shed.
Others stood inside the door of a disused church that overlooks the well-tended cemetery. The headstones told the story, here is an established cemetery shared by both traditions: Protestant graves on the left, Catholics to the right - all burials carried here are into existing family plots. Among those waiting by the gates, sheltering under the wet ivy, were playwright Brian Friel and novelist Dermot Healy.
The waiting continued, but the mood was good-natured. "Ben was never a man to hurry himself," said one woman.
The Kiely family grave had been opened and was ready for a son to join his parents and a brother who had died when Ben Kiely was a toddler.
Inscribed on the headstone was a trio of names: Thomas Kiely, his father, who had died on April 5th, 1958; Eugene, Ben's brother who had died aged eight, in 1922, and his mother, Sarah Alice, who lived to be 90. This was a family occasion.
To stand by that open grave, the various wreaths sent from family members, was to realise that Kiely the writer was also husband, a father, a grandfather and an uncle.
In a final lightening, before dusk, the sky briefly seemed less grey and the wind became less bitter. On cue the hearse appeared, almost unnoticed from the other direction.
It had been a long day for Kiely's last surviving sibling, elder sister Kathleen, mother of 13, who will be 94 next week.
She had travelled from Omagh at 6.30am yesterday with a son and daughter to Dublin for the funeral service in Donnybrook and then accompanied her brother on his final journey. Her daughter, Dympna McKay, spoke of the distress her mother felt at hearing of the death of her "wee brother". As was her late brother, Kathleen is a natural storyteller and has a lively sense of fun. But yesterday she was heartbroken and merely smiled when Brian Friel bent down over the car door and said, "I was a friend of Ben's."
Two of Kiely's three surviving children, John and Emer, were present. John remarked of his father's full life.
It was not a literary occasion, there was no graveside oration, it was not about writing, or fame - although while that distinctive voice is silenced, his words live on.
It was a gathering of people who were sharing a goodbye that was also a homecoming.
Having earlier officiated at the Dublin service, Mgr Tom Stack from Donnybrook shared the graveside prayers with the local curate, Fr Neil Farren, and said: "we are proud to have brought this man back to you".
For all the sorrow at his passing, the family and friends were pleased that Ben Kiely, who had once studied for the priesthood who had left Omagh at the age of 19, almost 70 years ago, had returned.