Whitney Houston: In her afterglow

Daughter to follow Whitney Houston into showbiz.

LOS ANGELES:

Whitney Houston’s daughter Bobbi Kristina said on Sunday that she plans to follow her mother into show business. In her first interview since Houston’s death last month, Kristina — Houston’s daughter from her stormy relationship with singer Bobby Brown — says she still hears her late mother’s voice. “I feel her passing through me all the time,” she told TV talk show host Oprah Winfrey. “Lights turn on and off and I’m like, ‘Mom, what are you doing?’”

When asked if she will follow her mother into show business, the teenager says: “I have to carry on the legacy. We’re going to do the singing thing. It’s a lot of pressure, but she prepared me for it.”

The singer who sang smash hits like “I Will Always Love You” that sold over 170 million records during a nearly three-decade career, but fought a long battle against substance abuse while trying to keep her talent alive. Speculation has raged since her death that Whitney may have succumbed to a lethal cocktail of prescription drugs and alcohol, though official results from her autopsy are still on hold.

Her daughter, however, said her mother remains with her and that everyone misunderstands the troubled singer. “She literally is an angel. I saw her hurt. I saw her cry. We held each other through that,” she said. When asked what she wanted people to know about her mother she insisted: “They don’t know who she was. Everything people are saying about her — all that negativity, it’s garbage. In reality, only her family knows who she was.”

Published in The Express Tribune, March 13^th, 2012.