Singer Linda Nolan ‘never showed she was suffering’, says sister Denise
By Hannah Roberts, PA Entertainment Reporter
Singer Linda Nolan “never showed” she was “suffering” prior to her death aged 65, her sister Denise has said.
The Irish star, who rose to fame in family group The Nolans with sisters Coleen, Maureen, Bernie, Denise and Anne, died earlier in the month, surrounded by family, after being admitted to hospital in Blackpool with double pneumonia.
Denise said she travelled to the hospital in an ambulance with her sister, who had cancer, and added that her decline in health and death felt “very sudden”.
“She was amazing, when it came to her disease (cancer), I’ve never known anybody like her, she never showed it to me that she was suffering”, she told ITV’s Good Morning Britain (GMB),” she said.
“If she was having a bad day, she called it a duvet day, and she’d go to bed and stay in bed all day if she was having a bad day.
“She never let me see that side of her, as I said, if she wasn’t feeling well, she would go up to her room and that was it. But most of the time she was joking and laughing.”
Asked if it had been difficult to accept her death, she said: “Yes, it’s very difficult.
“The other day, I went to the hospital, packed her case, went in the ambulance, little pink case.
“She always used this pink small case, and my sister brought it back yesterday, and it set me off, because the case came back, but no Linda, it’s surreal, basically.”
She continued: “It’s been very hard. Her towel – she has her own bath towel – and I just washed it for when she comes home and that set me off, looking at the towels, silly things like that, you know?
“It’s been really hard. I’m having a dry day today. I cried so much yesterday, I’m having a day off from it.”
She also said that some people were finding it hard to come to her house, where Linda was staying, as they say: “‘There’s too many memories of Linda there. I can’t handle it’.”
Nolan had been a long-time campaigner and fundraiser for cancer awareness, having been diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005.
The Dublin-born singer was given the all-clear in 2011, but in 2017 was told she had secondary breast cancer which later spread to her brain.