Coleen Nolan knows more about grief then she would ever wish to. In fact, she’s literally written the book on it. Her new guide A Hand To Hold - All I've Learnt About Grief .
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shares the poignant stories from Coleen’s past - including this exclusive extract about the lessons she learned after her sister’s Bernie’s devastating death in 2013. But here Coleen opens up about the loss of two very significant women in her her brother Brian's wife Linzie who died from a suddenly from a viral infection in her 30s..
..and the very different experience of losing her beloved mum Maureen to dementia after five years of pain.
Here, as she prepares to release her new book inspired by her Mirror and Co-op Funeralcare podcasts, COLEEN NOLAN share her honest and frank account...
. My first really notable experience with grief was when my sister-in-law, Linzie, died suddenly in 1991 after contracting a viral infection. She was only 26 years old – the same age as I was – and it was such a terrible shock, it shook me to the core.
All these years later in fact, I don’t think I’ll ever get over that first sudden grief; it will haunt me forever. But while my family and everyone who knew Linzie were trying to come to terms with their loss, I saw how hard people found it to know what to say to us. I think, from then on, I knew I wanted to be able to say a few words to other people who found themselves in my shoes.
Of course, in the years between then and now, life has taken more peopl.