Bobbi Kristina, Patricia Houston Open Up to Oprah Winfrey
March 11, 2012 — -- Whitney Houston's family laughed and cried remembering the iconic singer during Oprah Winfrey's OWN special Sunday night.
"I'm doing as good as I possibly can," Houston's only daughter, Bobbi Kristina, told Winfrey. "Just trying to keep going."
Winfrey descended on the Atlanta, Ga. home of Houston's sister-in-law and manager, Patricia (Pat) Houston, to talk with Bobbi Kristina and more of Houston's closest family members.
Poised and professional beyond her 19 years, Bobbi Kristina talked about how her mother continues to have a presence in her life.
"I can hear her voice and her spirit talking to me telling me keep moving, baby. I can always feel her with me," she said. "She humbles me. I remember what she told me, I remember what she taught me ... She was a sister, a comforter. The spirit that she had -- no matter where she was ... she touched everyone."
Winfrey asked Bobbi Kristina if she's had a visitation from her mother.
"Oh yes, lights turn on. Her spirit is strong," she said.
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Though she's mourning, Bobbi Kristina said she's "accepted" that her mother is gone, saying, "I've got to keep moving. I've got to carry on her legacy."
She revealed fairly extensive plans to follow in her parent's footsteps.
"We are going to do the singing thing, the acting thing, the dancing thing. It's a lot of pressure but she prepared me for it," she said.
Along with Bobbi Kristina, Winfrey interviewed Houston's brother Gary and his wife Patricia. It was the family's first sit-down interview since Houston's sudden death on Feb. 11.
Pat Houston gave the family's first account about what happened in Whitney's room at the Beverly Hilton Hotel the day she died.
After running errands on Feb. 11, Pat returned to the hotel and visited a room where Whitney was set to film an infomercial.
A few minutes later she went to Whitney's room. "I heard screaming," Pat told Winfrey and recounted that she saw Whitney's hair stylist "fall to her knees, saying oh my God, oh my God." Pat walked by a woman who opened her hotel room door to see what was going on; she told the woman to call 911.
A tearful Pat then told Winfrey that as she entered Whitney's room she saw her brother Ray, the singer's security guard, trying to revive Whitney "to the point of exhaustion. I told him let it go, I'm sorry." She added that when she finally saw Whitney "she had a peacefulness on her face."
Pat described her sense of shock and inability to leave Whitney's side even after the paramedics asked her to.
"She's always telling me, 'I got you,'" she told Winfrey. "I still have to stand, even with her being gone, I still have to stand for her."
Pat admitted that the "handwriting was on the wall" with Whitney. She said she knew the singer was in trouble at the "end of the '90s" but believes that Bobby Brown, Houston's ex-husband, wasn't necessairly the cause. "I can't say that he introduced drugs to her," she said. "I don't think that's true."
She also didn't think that the star's problems in her final days involved substance abuse. Instead, she attributed Whitney's downfall to a lifestyle change where she saw Whitney "chasing a dream ... looking for comfort, love ... and it was younger."
She said that Whitney was chasing someone "that would ultimately hurt her."
