Barbra at 83: “You Get Old and Everybody Is Dying Around You”
In a quiet corner of her Malibu home overlooking the Pacific, Barbra Streisand spoke the sentence no one wants to say aloud, yet everyone who reaches 83 eventually feels in their bones: “You get to be old and everybody is dying around you.”
The words came during a rare, unguarded conversation in November 2025, surrounded by framed Playbills, gold records, and photographs of faces no longer here.
Tony Bennett. Sidney Poitier. Stephen Sondheim. Marvin Hamlisch. James Caan. Her beloved mother, Diana, gone since 2002. Her stepfather, Louis Kind, whose cruelty once shaped her childhood. Even her dog Samantha, immortalized in song, left paw prints on her heart that still ache. “I look at these pictures,” she said softly, “and I realize how many goodbyes I’ve already said.”
Grief has become a familiar houseguest, arriving unannounced and staying longer each time.
She remembers the last phone call with Sondheim, the final lunch with Bennett, the way Hamlisch’s laugh used to fill a room. “We were the soundtrack of each other’s lives,” she whispered. “Now the music plays, but the voices are missing.” Some nights she walks past the piano and swears she hears them harmonizing anyway.
What frightens her most is not her own mortality, but the thought of leaving her son Jason, her stepchildren, her grandchildren adrift without her.
“I worry they’ll feel unmoored,” she admitted, eyes glistening. “I’ve spent my whole life trying to protect the people I love—through my work, my philanthropy, my stubbornness. The idea that one day I won’t be here to fight for them… that keeps me awake.” She paused, then added with a small, defiant smile, “But then I remember: I taught them how to fight too.”
Time moves faster now, each year shorter than the last.
She still records, still directs, still argues passionately about camera angles and phrasing, because creating is the only way she knows how to outrun the silence. “When I’m working, I don’t feel old,” she said. “I feel necessary.” Yet even in the studio, the ghosts sit in the control room—Sondheim nodding approval, Bennett humming along, her mother finally proud.
There is no dramatic conclusion, no tidy acceptance.
Only the daily, quiet bravery of waking up, choosing joy, and singing anyway. “I don’t fear death,” she said at last. “I fear being forgotten by the people I love most. So I keep making things—movies, music, memories—so they’ll always have pieces of me to hold onto when I’m gone.”
Barbra Streisand is not fading.
She is burning slower, brighter, more deliberately,
turning every remaining day into a love letter
to the ones who will have to live without her.
And when her final curtain falls,
the world will still be singing her songs,
because she made sure
the music would outlive the silence.
