David Bowie’s daughter Lexi Jones shares heartbreaking home videos from her childhood with late pop star as she writes poem about fading memories and ‘remembering his laugh’

The daughter of pioneering singer David Bowie has shared personal home videos of the late pop icon, ten years after his death to cancer. 

Bowie passed away at the New York City apartment he shared with supermodel wife Iman and their daughter Alexandria ‘Lexi’ Jones on January 10 2016, following a private battle with liver cancer. 

The enigmatic singer, 69 at the time of his death, had been diagnosed with the disease 18 months earlier. His twenty sixth and final album, Black Star, was released on his birthday, two days before he died.

Taking to Instagram on Tuesday, Bowie’s bereaved daughter – his only child with Iman – shared an introspective video in which she attempts to recapture fading childhood memories of her father. 

Seated at a writing desk, Lexi, 25, struggles to record her memories in the blank pages of a journal after beginning a written sentence with the words ‘He was.’ 

Addressing the viewer with an internal monologue, she says: ‘He was. I start there because it feels like the right beginning, but the sentence never seems to go anywhere. 

‘I sit here trying to remember clearly, like if I close my eyes long enough the picture will come back the way it was. But memory doesn’t work like that. 

‘I remember movement more than anything, someone standing ahead of me, the sound of a voice before I even realise where it’s coming from,  the feeling that if I call out, they’ll turn around, and they do. 

‘But something about it is always wrong. The moment never finishes the way it should, like a door that opens but never quite does.’ 

The monologue is interspersed with shaky home video footage, including childhood footage of herself dressed a Dorothy from the Wizard Of Oz while Bowie praises her off-camera, and never-before-seen clips of her father in bed. 

‘It’s strange what stays and what disappears,’ she adds. ‘I can remember the way a room felt, the way laughter sounded from down the hall, the way someone walked away from me. But when I try to see him standing right in front of me, the memory slips somewhere else. 

‘Maybe that’s just what time does, it doesn’t take everything, just the details, just the sharp edges, just the parts we thought would stay forever. 

‘What remains is softer – fragments, moments. A feeling that someone existed before you for a while, that you shared the same rooms, the same days, the same small pieces of life. 

‘So maybe finishing a sentence isn’t the point, maybe it was never meant to be finished. Maybe the truth is just this. He was. And for a long time, that was enough.’

Lexi, a New York based artist, recently insisted she does ‘not blame her family’ for ‘forcibly’ removing from her home and sending her to multiple treatment centres, leading her to miss her father’s final days. 

Taking to Instagram in February, she said she held no resentment towards her loved ones and understood that they were trying their best to help her through something that ‘none of them fully understood at the time’. 

‘My story was never meant to place blame on my parents,’ she wrote. ‘I love my parents deeply and I don’t hold resentment towards them. 

‘They were trying to help a child who was struggling in ways none of us fully understood at the time. I never shared this to create a narrative of family conflict’.

‘What I as trying to talk about was the experience of being a young person inside the teenage treatment system and how it feels while it is happening. Those feelings can exist at the same time as love for the people who were trying to help you. Both things can be true’.

‘I shared my experience because many people who have been through similar programs carry confusion and silence around it. Hearing from others who related has already shown me the messaged reached who it was meant to reach’. 

She went on: ‘I’m not asking anyone to speculate about my family or assign fault to anyone in my life. My intention is conversation and understanding about a system, not judgement of individuals’. 

Before adding: ‘I spoke about something that shaped me in hopes someone else might feel less alone in theirs’. 

Lexi previously described how she was just 14 when two men ‘well over six feet tall’ came to take her to a treatment facility.

She also recalled her father writing her a heartfelt letter when revealing the decision to send her to the facility, which read: ‘I’m sorry we have to do this.’

Looking back on her childhood she said: ‘Adults would talk to me differently than they would talk to other kids. Some were not interested in me as a person at all, and only as a proximity to something else.’

She added that she felt like she ‘existed as an idea’ rather than a real person, with constant projections and expectations from others.

She continued: ‘Something hit me pretty young before I was around ten. I started seeing a therapist because my teachers noticed something was off, and so did my parents. That was around the time I had my first anxiety attack.

‘I started to feel depressed. I was failing school. I had learning disabilities, that made everything feel harder, and I hated the way I looked. I developed bulimia when I was 12. I started self-harming when I was eleven. 

‘I felt stupid, incompetent, unworthy, useless, unloveable, and having successful parents only made it worse. It felt like I would never live up to them. I couldn’t understand how I came from people that were thriving in every single direction while I was failing at everything.’

Following her father’s diagnosis and turning to drink and drugs to cope, she said:  ‘Everyone around me was experimenting. But for me, it wasn’t about fun. I wasn’t experimenting, I was escaping.

‘When the party ended for everybody else, I kept going, and I drank and got high alone. I became someone who lashed out. I was cruel to people who didn’t treat me the way I wanted to be treated. I was begging to be respected by becoming something people feared, or at least noticed.’

Eventually, she said, an intervention occurred that was both unexpected and deeply traumatising. 

She said: ‘My dad read a letter he had written. I don’t really remember what it said, but I do remember the last line and it said, “I’m sorry we have to do this”.

‘Then two men came through the door, and they were both well over six feet tall. They told me I could do this the easy way or the hard way. I chose the hard way. I resisted. I screamed. I held onto the table leg.

‘They grabbed me, they put their hands on me, they pulled me away from everything I knew and I was screaming bloody murder. I was screaming for someone to help me, but no one did…

‘I felt stripped of any right to stay in my own life. They got me back into a black SUV and shoved me inside. By the time the door shut, my parents were already gone. I was alone. I was in a car with two strange men that wouldn’t tell me where we were going and I just sat there completely horrified and silent.’

Lexi said she spent 91 days at a ‘wilderness therapy’ programme living outdoors in winter conditions with no privacy, showering once a week, and being forced to count out loud every time she used a makeshift bathroom so staff could monitor her.

Wilderness therapy, also known as outdoor behavioural healthcare, is a highly controversial style of mental health treatment developed in the US for adolescents and young adults. 

It combines intensive outdoor activities with counselling to purportedly address behavioural, emotional, and substance abuse issues.

Lexi acknowledged that her experiences have shaped who she is today, making her ’emotionally intelligent, introspective, not afraid to reflect on some of the harder things’.

She added: ‘I was forced to look inward before I even had a chance to look outward. I had to understand emotions before I understood algebra. I had to become fluent in the language of healing before I even knew who I was.’

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