Mark Cagney has said he felt like a manic zombie and thought he was being punished after his first wife, Ann Humphries, tragically died.
After suffering a haemorrhage and collapsing in Brown Thomas, Ann sadly passed away 10 days later at the age of 31, RSVP Live reports.
Mark said: "Ann had surgery and then a second, fatal haemorrhage."
The former Ireland AM presenter admitted that he didn't want to speak to anybody and he shut himself off from the outside world while dealing with the grief.
Mark said he didn't want to get out of bed, but he also feared going to sleep.
He told the Sunday Independent: "I'll tell you what I was. Here's the thing about despair. What is despair? Despair, not so much that you want to give up and end it all.
"You don't want to do anything. You don't want to get up. I didn't want to go to sleep. I was like a manic zombie. I didn't want to have any contact with people."
Asked if he felt suicidal, he explained: "I didn't want to live, I didn't want to die. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I was going mad."
Dealing with the death of his wife and working full-time in 98FM in Dublin, Mark almost felt like he was in purgatory or that it was all a joke to punish him.
He was waiting to wake up from the nightmare but, sadly, that never happened.
"I didn't know whether she was really dead or not. I didn't know whether it was a bad joke. I didn't know if I had done something bad and I was being punished for it.
"And this was my prison sentence, or my purgatory and eventually I'd get a tap on the shoulder and someone would say, 'Ah, listen. It's over, now go on. But that will teach you a lesson. Be a good boy in the future.' Stupid, mad stuff," continued the former Virgin Media Television star.
Mark later married Audrey Byrne in September 2002.
He is father to four kids; Gerard, Sophie, Daniel and Mary.
