The pain of Winehouse’s father

Mitch Winehouse still can’t believe that his daughter, Amy, is gone, said Patrick Strudwick in The Independent (U.K.). The British soul singer died last summer after a long and public struggle with drug and alcohol addiction. She was 27. “I wish it had been me and not my daughter,” he says, his eyes bloodshot and glistening. After his daughter’s death, Mitch set up the Amy Winehouse Foundation, which helps drug abusers and underprivileged children. But the charity work hasn’t eased his loss. “You can help all the kids all around the world, but it’s never going to take that [grief] away.” Mitch has tried other, more unconventional ways of coping with this pain. “I’ve been to spiritualists and mediums, and they’ve given me great proof that Amy is still there,” he says. “Some of the messages we’ve been given have been incredible—only things I would know, nothing they could have got from the Internet. I sat with a top psychic in America—I can’t remember his name. The FBI uses him on cold cases to help find missing bodies. The first thing he said to me was, ‘This is Amy. Dad, there is a life after death.’” Winehouse stops, suddenly aware of how this sounds. “I don’t want people to think I’m a deluded fool.”

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