Coleen Nolan breaks down in tears on Loose Women return after sister Linda's funeral

Linda, a member of The Nolans alongside Coleen and their siblings, passed away at 65 after a long battle with breast cancer. She was laid to rest on Saturday at St. Paul's Church in Blackpool, with a service that Coleen described as "a beautiful day".

Speaking on the ITV show, Coleen, 59, admitted she was having “meltdown moments” as she tried to navigate life without her sister. "It’s difficult to say, it's still too soon. You have great moments and then you have absolute meltdown moments and they come out the blue," she said, her voice shaking.

She recalled how Linda had personally chosen her coffin just months earlier. "The funeral – in her pink, shiny coffin … which she picked out on Instagram four months ago … she said, 'If I die, that’s the one I want.' It was a beautiful day, if you can say that, for Linda. She would have absolutely loved it, and the weather was beautiful."

Coleen also thanked the public for the love the family received, and how much it had meant to them. She said:"People you never met before are sending just the most amazing messages, cards, flowers to the whole family. And you probably think, 'They don’t even read it,' but we read as many as we can. I can’t tell you how much it means to us. That really helped."

Despite the pain, she knew she had to return to work, acknowledging that Linda wouldn’t have wanted her to stop. "It's just hard. Because there was a time where I thought, 'Do I go back? Is it too soon?' And then … you have to. Because life goes on," she said.

She also wanted to send a message to others battling cancer, saying that Linda’s passing wasn’t a reason to give up.

"Linda has had this for 20 years, and I think that the one thing she'd want to say is that she wouldn’t want anybody that was still going through this horrendous disease to go, 'Oh, I may as well give up, because it got her in the end.' Because actually, it wasn't that that got her in the end, she got flu and pneumonia."

"She was a massive force in our family, and it feels like such a hole. And because I'm the baby … and then it was Bernie, Linda and then it went up. And now it's me, and then the age gap's quite far," she said.

She also recalled a quiet moment with her siblings, where the reality of Linda’s absence hit hard."We're all still really close but the six of us in the car – you know my sisters and my two brothers – my brother just went, 'And then there were six,' and it was just like … I was looking at them, and honestly, I was like, 'I can’t do this anymore,' but you have to."

Coleen concluded by thanking her fans for their letters of support and thanking the nurses at the hospital and hospice that treated Linda for their amazing care.