Lottie Tomlinson is opening up about a difficult time. The influencer, whose brother is One Direction alum Louis Tomlinson , got candid about what it was like for her and her siblings to grieve the death of mother Johannah Deakin and youngest sister Félicité Tomlinson in short succession. "Losing mum was so hard," Lottie told The Times in an interview published July 24.
"I was only a teenager but at least I knew that her death was a possibility, even though she didn’t accept it." Johannah—who died in December 2016 after a battle with leukemia —had asked Lottie, Louis and Félicité, as well as 20-year-old twin daughters Phoebe Tomlinson and Daisy Tomlinson , to keep her cancer diagnosis a secret in the lead up to her death. “It was hard because you feel so isolated, but I understood," Lottie shared.
"Louis was in the public eye, and she didn’t want him questioned. She was determined to fight it and didn’t want everyone pitying her." But that was only the beginning of the family’s tragedy.
Three years later, the youngest Tomlinson sibling Félicité died of an accidental overdose at age 18. "The pain was indescribable," Lottie recalled. "I kept thinking, ‘Why me? This can’t be happening again.
When is this going to end?’" At first, the Tanologist founder said she struggled to deal with her grief, confessing that she got "really drunk to numb the pain" at the funeral. "I couldn’t come to terms with it," Lottie continued. "I can’t even remember ho.