Kellie Pickler: HEALING AFTER HEARTBREAK

MONTHS AFTER HER HUSBAND’S SUICIDE, THE COUNTRY STAR IS STRUGGLING WITH THE SECRETS HE KEPT AND SIGNS SHE MISSED.

Support System “She has a few good friends she’s been leaning on,” says a source. “It’s been healing. Kellie doesn’t know what she’d do without them.”

NEARLY three months after Kellie Pickler’s husband killed himself in their Nashville home, the country star was spotted with friends outside the $2.4 million residence where she and an assistant found Kyle Jacobs’ lifeless body Feb. 17. Inside, workmen were painting and repairing the upstairs bedroom where Kyle died of a selfinflicted gunshot wound. “She can’t bear to stay in the house and has been staying with friends,” an insider tells Star. “She stopped by to oversee the fixing up.”

Repairing her broken heart will take more than paint and spackle. On May 9, the Davidson County Medical Examiner released a toxicology report noting that there were no drugs in the 49-year-old producer’s system but that there was evidence of “pseudoseizures, gastrointestinal bleeding, elevated liver enzymes and chronic alcohol use.” Now insiders tell Star the 36-year-old is reckoning with what she missed in the weeks and months before her husband took his life. “She didn’t know it was that bad,” says a source. “She blames herself for not seeing the signs.”