Parents, Public Braced for Amy Winehouse’s Death Through Five-Year Fade
After reading this article, I realize that there is one thing YOU MUST NEVER LOOSE & that is HOPE! Her parents basically gave up on her. That is when they should have pushed her & been there for her the MOST.
To Amy Winehouse’s family, the singer/songwriter’s death was not unexpected. It was “only a matter of time,” her mother, Janis Winehouse, was quoted as saying in the Sunday Mirror. She’d visited her daughter the day before she died, and said, “She seemed out of it. But her passing still hasn’t hit me.”
She said their final encounter had ended with the weakened Amy saying “I love you, mum.” “Those are the words I will always treasure,” Janis said. “I’m glad I saw her when I did.”
Father Mitch Winehouse had been in New York preparing to do a series of showcases for his new jazz album. He canceled the shows and was seen at JFK a few hours after the news hit. “I’m completely devastated,” he was reported as saying. “I’m coming home. I have to be with Amy. I can’t crack up, for her sake. My family needs me.”
Mitch Winehouse had been vocal in the past—too vocal, for Amy’s tastes—about his daughter’s substance abuse. As far back as three years ago, he was raising the specter of her possible demise when he publicly revealed that she was suffering from emphysema. “Doctors have told her if she goes back to smoking drugs, it won’t just ruin her voice, it will kill her,” he was quoted as saying in 2008, while issuing an ultimatum to drug dealers to stay away.
If the family had clearly braced themselves for this news at various points over the years, so had the public, which had grown nearly inured to tales of the singer’s inebriated escapades and false promises of new output.
It never helped their cause that other famous members of the so-called “27 Club” who’d also died at age 27—including Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Janis Joplin—had managed to record great music right up until their deaths.
Winehouse’s last appearance on stage was just three days before her death-a non-singing cameo at a show by her beloved goddaughter, Dionne Bromfield, at the iTunes Festival in London. Her final actual gig had been a disastrous June 18 tour kickoff in Serbia, the booing of which was seen and mocked around the world on YouTube. Three days later, the cancellation of the rest of the tour was announced.
The day after the Serbian disaster, her father, Mitch Winehouse, who had been candid about the extent of his daughter’s troubles, tweeted, “Amy was advised by me and her manager not to do gigs. These were contracted months ago when she was well.” Two days later, he added, “By the way, Amy is not retiring. She is going to get some r and r and come back better than ever.”
Winehouse had an on-and-off relationship with her dad, as with many figures in her life. When Mitch Winehouse joined Twitter in 2009, she was the first to celebrate, crowing that he was already better at social media than she was. But after he spoke about her demons to the press, she tweeted in January 2010, “WHY don’t my dad WRITE a SONG when something bothers him instead of going on national tv? An you thought YOUR parents were embarrassing.”
Since her death, many celebrities have tweeted their sorrow, but Russell Brand, who knew her well before she achieved stardom, wrote what may have been the lengthiest celebrity euology to date. He duly noted her gift for “good banter” but talked about how difficult it was to forge a true connection with Winehouse. “All addicts, regardless of the substance or their social status share a consistent and obvious symptom; they’re not quite present when you talk to them. They communicate to you through a barely discernible but un-ignorable veil. Whether a homeless smack head troubling you for 50p for a cup of tea or a coked-up, pinstriped exec foaming off about his ‘speedboat’ there is a toxic aura that prevents connection. They have about them the air of elsewhere, that they’re looking through you to somewhere else they’d rather be. And of course they are. The priority of any addict is to anaesthetise the pain of living to ease the passage of the day with some purchased relief.”
Added Brand, “Whether this tragedy was preventable or not is now irrelevant. It is not preventable today. We have lost a beautiful and talented woman to this disease. Not all addicts have Amy’s incredible talent. Or Kurt’s or Jimi’s or Janis’s; some people just get the affliction. All we can do is adapt the way we view this condition, not as a crime or a romantic affectation but as a disease that will kill.” And one that, from all indications, murdered her art five years before it took her life.
SOURCE: Yahoo Music
