What did you miss?
Coleen Nolan has told how her late sister Bernie’s message to her – to cry for two weeks only after she died – has kept her going through all the grief her family has faced.
Bernie died in 2013 aged 52 after battling breast cancer and two of the sisters’ other siblings – Anne and Linda – have also fought cancer. Anne celebrated being cancer free in 2020 but Linda has recently shared that recent scans showed that two of the tumours in her brain have grown.
Coleen, who has faced a skin cancer diagnosis herself, has now told how she returns to Bernie’s words to her before she passed away and that the advice has “pushed” her through everything.
What, how and why?
Discussing Bernie’s death on ITV’s This Morning, Loose Women star Coleen said her sister told her: “You can cry for two weeks – a lot, because I deserve it – and then I want you to get up and carry on with it.”
She went on: “Two weeks down the line I still didn’t want to get up, I didn’t want to do anything to be honest, but I kept hearing her go, ‘Come on now, come on’.”
Coleen said there has been “a lot of loss and a lot of bad news” because she has also lost her parents, sister-in-law, and sister Linda’s husband Brian Hudson, who died in 2007.
“But Bernie’s talk to me is the one that’s pushed me through all of it,” she said. “Because you do have to carry on.”
The star – who has penned a book about grief entitled A Hand To Hold, All I’ve Learnt About Grief – said the main thing she had learned was that “none of it matters”.
Asked what her experiences had taught her, she replied: “I guess that life has to go on and it does go on and in actual fact, this is terrible, none of it matters. None of this matters, do you know what I mean? I used to get so stressed and down about things. Now I go, ‘I bet Bernie wishes she was here getting down about her tax bill or her next job’ and it puts everything into perspective.
“And now I grasp each day… and I’m not scared to say no anymore.”
What else did Coleen Nolan say on This Morning?
Coleen also stressed the importance of being “open” about loss and grief and said it was always “better to say something” to someone dealing with a bereavement.
“We’ve had people cross the street because they don’t know what to say to us when we lost Bernie,” she said. “And my sister Linda, when she lost her husband, a friend she’d known years she never heard from again because she didn’t know what to say.”
She went on: “It’s so important to let your family, no matter what age we are, to let your family know what kind of funeral you want, because the amount of families that splinter over a funeral because they all have their opinions.
“My sister Bernie literally left a whole note, who was going in what car, what flowers she wanted, what songs she wanted, how she wanted it and honestly on the day, which is stressful enough, it was so lovely for all of us to know that we couldn’t argue, as that’s what Bernie wanted.
That’s when it brought it home to me how important it is.”
Coleen Nolan says Loose Women are her ‘surrogate sisters’
Coleen has been a regular on Loose Women for over 20 years, where she sits on the panel alongside fellow TV stars including Janet Street Porter, Nadia Sawalha, Linda Robson and Judi Love. She said the support of her fellow panellists had been invaluable over the years.
“They are my surrogate sisters,” she said. “All of them. They have got me through everything in my life.”
