Former RTE newsreader Una O’Hagan has opened up about how she admitted she felt “relieved” that her late husband Colm Keane decided to stop taking his medication in the final weeks before his death - because he didn’t want to prolong his life.
Colm died in January after he was diagnosed with cancer.
Una revealed the 70-year-old decided to stop taking his medication and no longer wanted to prolong his life.
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She said: “When Colm said he wasn’t going to take the medication to prolong his life I knew too that it was the right thing to do.
“I also felt relieved because Colm could not cope with the alternative, that painful thing of trying desperately to keep someone alive.”
The couple suffered a huge loss when their son Sean died from cancer in 2007 when he was just 20-years-old.
Una said Colm believed that after Sean’s death he would meet his son again.
“Even when Sean died we both believed that we would meet him again. A lot of people would say to me now ‘I’m sure that Colm and Sean are together now’ and I believe they are.
“I don’t see them with wings floating around on clouds. Colm defined heaven as not being in a physical place.
“It’s a post-death state of supreme happiness where all hopes and wishes are fulfilled.
“So I think Sean and Colm are together in some way and if you’re talking intense happiness, I’m sure they are talking about football.
“He knew he was going to meet Sean and inevitably I would be following along. Colm was very clear-sighted in those final few weeks,” she told the RTE Guide.
Una also told of her final few moments with Colm in the Waterford Hospice where he died.
“I was holding Colm’s hand and talking to him all the time. I told him that I loved him. I told him that he was a great dad. And I told him that he had left a wonderful legacy behind.”
Una told how Colm insisted that Una publish his book, Journey’s End: The Truth About Life After Death, after he died.
“One of the last things he said was that I had to publish Journey’s End. He insisted on it, and I think that was also quite clever of him because he knew that I would be quite busy working on the book, something that helped in the months following Colm’s death.
“But then there was nobody like Colm for being a producer, always three or four steps ahead of me. One night I was at the computer, working on the book, feeling low, but then I smiled because I thought ‘Colm knew exactly what he was doing with this book.’”
Una also opened up about their final weeks together doing “lovely, ordinary, mundane things”.
“So in those last few weeks together we did all those lovely, ordinary, mundane things because that’s really what life is made up of.
“The last long walk we did was on Youghal beach, near where Colm grew up, a week or so before he died.
“In fact, the first time we met we went for a walk on Youghal beach and now, some 34 years later, we did the same thing.”
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