This article mentions substance abuse.
In 2016, One Direction star Louis Tomlinson’s world was rocked when his mom, Johannah Deakin, died at age 43 after being diagnosed with leukemia.
Louis was just 24 years old at the time, and together, he and his then-18-year-old sister, Lottie Tomlinson, tried to be the rocks for their younger siblings.
Speaking to the Times, Lottie said that when she lost Félicité, who she affectionately refers to as “Fizz,” she thought that she would “never be happy again.”
Recalling her mom’s illness, Lottie said that Johannah returned home from a vacation with the flu, and was diagnosed shortly afterward. However, the family were initially given hope that the cancer would be treatable.
“It all happened so fast,” Lottie said. “I remember being in London at work and getting a call from her partner — she couldn’t say the words herself. It was too hard for her.”
At her mother’s request, the whole family kept her illness a secret from everybody — including their close friends — for months because she was concerned about Louis being “questioned” about it by the press.
Lottie immediately left her home in London to return to her family in Doncaster to help take care of her younger siblings. When she took them into the hospital for visits, they “tried to keep it light.”
“The only way Mom could cope was to keep it normal,” she said. “Then, when the doctors said the transfusions hadn’t worked, she came home to die.”
“We went to see her in hospital in Sheffield, and the next morning, we woke up and were told she had died. We felt numb. We didn’t know what to do with ourselves,” Lottie added, also sharing that they weren’t offered any professional support or counseling at the time.
Lottie revealed that she was so grief-stricken she can’t remember her mom’s funeral, which Louis paid for. She said: “I just remember getting really drunk to numb the pain. I couldn’t come to terms with it. I can’t even remember how we organized it. My instinct was to take over as the eldest girl and step into my mom’s shoes, so that is what I did.”
Lottie’s grandmother encouraged her to return to London after a few months, but Lottie remained concerned about how Félicité was coping.
“She was bottling her grief for so long; it was too much and made her turn to other things,” she said. “I think Mom’s death destroyed her. Only my mom seemed to understand her.”
“She was old enough to do what she wanted at 19; she was partying and taking stuff to numb everything,” Lottie said. “She did go into rehab, but to me, it didn’t feel like an addiction problem, but a way to blank out her grief.”
Lottie was invited on a trip to Bali in March 2019, and she checked with her sister if she was OK with her going and offered to stay behind. Félicité reassured her that she was OK, but soon afterward, Lottie received a call from Louis telling her that Félicité had died.
“We weren’t mentally prepared,” Lottie said.
And having experienced so much grief at such a young age, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Lottie has been left terrified of losing more people that she loves. This fear intensified when her son, Lucky, was born in 2022.
“I became fixated [on the idea that] something bad would happen to him, so I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “You go to the worst-case scenario, because that’s happened to you twice, to two of the closest people in your life. I couldn’t turn the lights off at night; I needed to see him all the time.”
Thankfully, the star — who is currently pregnant with her second child — managed to overcome this anxiety, and now she wants to offer hope to other people who have suffered loss.
The National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline is 1-800-950-6264 (NAMI) and provides information and referral services; GoodTherapy.org is an association of mental health professionals from more than 25 countries who support efforts to reduce harm in therapy.
If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse, you can call SAMHSA’s National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357) and find more resources here.