“My focus is my children,” Chris Cornell’s widow Vicky Cornell tells PEOPLE (via SPIN) of the couple’s daughter Toni, 12, and son Christopher, 11. The Soundgarden and Audioslave singer was also dad to daughter, Lily, 17, from his previous marriage. Says Vicky, “I’m trying to keep their little hearts as happy as I can and being there for them.”
“It’s really hard,” she admits. “But they know he never would have left them like that. Not in a million years. Knowing Daddy loved them — that’s what keeps them as strong as they are.”
She reiterated that he did not seem like himself during their conversation on the phone on the night he died, and that she believed that drug-induced emotional imbalance was the explicit cause of his death.
“This was a father that gave you all,” says Vicky of her husband of 13 years. Just days before he left for Detroit, the rock star had made plans to take their kids to Disney World. “They’d go roll down hills together and bike ride. In our neighborhood he was the 6’3” dad on a scooter, running around with his kids.”
As she struggles to come to terms with the loss of her husband, Vicky says she’s buoyed knowing Chris “loved his children and me more than anything in the world.”
