MUMBAI: Singer Tom Jones admits that recovering from the death of his wife Melinda Rose Woodward is the "hardest thing" he has ever done.

Appearing in public for the first time since his wife passed away in April, the Welsh singer wept as he reflected on his 59 years of married life, insisting that the childhood sweethearts had enjoyed "a solid marriage that nothing could shake", reports telegraph.co.uk.

Jones revealed that he had learned while on tour that she had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer, giving her just a week to live. As she lay on her deathbed, she told him to carry on with a planned European tour, insisting, "Just go forward".

The 75-year-old said that recovering from the death of his wife was "the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life”.

“I was in the Philippines, that was when I got the call that it was terminal. I had to stop. So I flew back to Los Angeles and she had a week left, in the hospital," he added.

The couple married when they were just 16, when Woodward, better knows as Linda, was pregnant with their only child, Mark, and spent their lives together, despite Jones' reputation as a womaniser.

The singer said that he knew “she had always been very important to me, always”.

“Now I realise that she might have been the most important thing in my life. I realise even more now, how important she was to me," he added.

(Source: IANS)