In heartbreaking interviews in the US, the singer spoke out about how she lost her soulmate when Rene passed away, and how she’s coping day-by-day.
“Rene always insisted the show must go on,” she told People magazine.
“You know what, I’m 48 years old and I lost the love of my life. I miss him a lot from when he was great, but not when he was suffering. I cannot be selfish. You have to let people go.”
“I feel at peace.”
The mother-of-three also told of how she used a family favourite Disney movie, Up, to break the news of their father’s death to her kids.
“Before I told them that their dad was not there, I talked about when we, everybody, gets sick. Then I said, ‘Do you remember the movie Up?'” She said of the 2009 Disney feature length animation to ABC News.
“‘Oh,’ they said, ‘Yes, Ellie went up. You know, she, with the balloons.’ And I said, ‘Well, yeah. You know, today Papa went up.’”
Celine and Rene.
The Canadian songstress explained that whenever she heard her children refer to where their father had gone, she wanted to hear them say “up”.
“Up is good. Up is uplifting,” she explained.
She then took the children outside for a private family ceremony that involved sprinkling “pixie dust” and releasing balloons up into the sky.
“We’re gonna say ‘Papa we love you. Have a good up’ and we’re gonna spread this and it’s gonna go to him,” she remembers telling them.
Rene performed the role of manager as well as doting husband for Celine, and the 48-year-old put her career on hold three times to care for him through three different bouts of cancer.
At one point they believed they had removed the tumours that were making him so ill, but the disease returned aggressively in 2014.
The singer put her career on hold to be a carer for Rene before he passed away.
She recalls finally telling him he didn’t have to worry about her or anything else anymore as her last words to him before he passed.
“You were worrying for my career. You were worrying for the children. You were worrying for everything. It’s enough. Do you trust me? Please do. Trust me,” she recalled saying to the 73-year-old.
“It’s been a long, long journey,” the iconic artist confessed to ABC of the process of caring for her husband, whose cancer first appeared in 1999.
“We were living in hope, knowing that there’s no hope.”
Rene is survived by Celine and his three children René-Charles, 15, and five-year-old twins Nelson and Eddy.
“I really, really just want to prove to my kids their mother is strong,” she said.
This story was originally published on Woman’s Day.
