Celine Dion had opened up about losing her husband and manager René Angélil to cancer and says she believes he will ''always be with'' her.
Angélil passed away in January 2016 aged 73, having suffered from throat cancer since 2013, and the 48-year-old singer has said she now feels like the ''leader of the family''.
Dion, who has sons Rene-Charles, 16, and six-year-old twins Nelson and Eddy with Angélil, said she is starting to feel "stronger" about his death.
''When he left, he came inside of all of my kids' hearts and mine, he gave the rest of his 50 percent for me to be complete, to continue the rest of my life, to feel strong and to believe that I can still do this and he will always be with me.
"I feel stronger. He gave me the rest of him. I feel stronger, I step forward. I say what I mean, I mean what I say. I stand up for my kids and I feel like I'm the leader of the family," she told Entertainment Tonight.
Dion says her children ''didn't suffer'' with the news of their father's death, as she ''told them the truth'' about his condition.
"My oldest, 16, is not the man of the house [because] you have to have your own dreams.
''And the twins, they didn't suffer because I told them the truth. They didn't see my husband the last three years of their life, so they didn't get to know him so well.
''I was so confident in the way that I presented them the passing of their dad. [I told them that] he was going to be with us in a different way [and] I didn't have the rebound of that," she added.
Dion first met Angélil, in 1980, when she was 12 and he was 38, after her brother, Michel Dondalinger Dion, sent him a demonstration recording of Ce n'était qu'un rêve, or It Was Only a Dream/Nothing But A Dream, a song she, her mother the former Thérèse Tanguay, and her brother Jacques Dion had jointly written and composed.
They began a relationship in 1987 and became engaged in 1991. They married on 17 December 1994 at Notre-Dame Basilica in Montreal, Quebec.
