Mary Waterford has given a lot of life for a woman who deals daily with death.
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But she does not carry the burden of the dead and dying with her.
Most Sundays at her Macgregor home she hosts a huge family lunch.
There is a Happy Birthday sign hanging up which has not been taken down because it is usually someone's birthday.
Over the years she has learnt that people die the way they lived life and, if her insight is true, Waterford looks like the sort of person who will pass away some day in the distant future surrounded by lots of faces and conversation.
Waterford, who raised 10 children with her husband Colin, who themselves have produced 10 grandchildren so far, has counselled the dying for 17 years.
At the moment she co-ordinates pastoral and spiritual care at Clare Holland House - ACT Hospice and serves as director of the Clinical Pastoral Education Training Centre in Canberra.
As Australia's population surpasses 23 million people, a growth which requires the expansion of palliative care and the need for more to be educated on how to counsel the terminally ill and the families of the dying, we ask what the job has taught her.
She explains she was mainly a full-time mother and long-time volunteer for Meals on Wheels until the age of 43.
''If you've isolated yourself during life, that's how you'll die. If you're a grumpy person, you'll die grumpy,'' says Waterford, now aged 60.
''[Death] doesn't change your character.''
To listen to her brings back that famous quote from Winston Churchill, who realised the enduring nature of his own personality would be taken to the grave when he said, ''I am ready to meet my maker. Whether my maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.''
There are, apparently, few Hollywood-style epiphanies on the deathbed and the same goes for final words of wisdom, but some people question what they could have done better.
One dying woman, who had a strong Christian faith and was a nurse by profession, had been kicking her blankets off at night but always awoke to find the same blankets tucked in neatly around her by the staff.
The woman, struck by times in her life when she hadn't cared for others in such a way, cried and asked Waterford, ''Have I loved enough?''
''It was an epiphany for her and it was brave,'' says Waterford, a Catholic, who listens compassionately whenever asked about the meaning of life or religion.
Waterford's industry has moved away from traditional chaplaincy and people of all faiths are welcome on any of her teams, including the Buddhist nun at Canberra Hospital at the moment.
A recent University of Queensland study found Australia's palliative care workforce is ageing as the population ages and in the future there may not be enough specialist palliative care services to meet the need.
Cancer patients dominate most palliative care services but most people who die of diseases with predictable illnesses suffer from organ failure and frailty and not cancer.
One of the great dilemmas of modern medicine is to determine how and when palliative and supportive care should be offered to these people.
Often these patients are kids, who just want to be at home.
Waterford works with all demographics, including children who, she says, tend to be pragmatic about impending death, despite their parents' anguish.
So how does a mother of so many children not get emotionally harmed by watching kids die?
She has learnt how to survive the grief that surrounds her and has developed a way to move on after being involved so deeply in someone's transit to death.
''I don't keep hold of [the dying person's] journey, I give their journey back to them.''
According to Care Search, an online group in which people in the palliative care industry discuss issues, more seriously sick people are cared for in hospitals these days rather than at home, meaning fewer people have direct experience of looking after the dying.
Everyone has an idea of what makes ''a good death'', Waterford says, and this skews the way they care for the terminally ill.
''There was one man we realised was going to die soon but he wanted to take an experimental drug which was going to involve a day-trip to another hospital,'' she explains.
''We knew he wasn't going to last another day and were worried, but he went and had the drug and died in the next 24 hours.
''He had been through a lot of pain to have the drug.
''As his wife was sitting next to the bed where her husband lay, she said that throughout his life he had been a risk-taker and that somehow the researchers who gave the drug might be able to get one small piece of information to one day make a huge breakthrough.
''And I realised we could have taken an important component of his life away [if he had not been allowed to have the experimental drug].
''So he died as he lived, as a risk taker.''