Céline Dion at 57: “You Get Old and Everybody Is Dying Around You”
In the stillness of her Las Vegas home, surrounded by photographs of René smiling from every wall, Céline Dion spoke the sentence that stopped hearts around the world: “You get to be old and everybody is dying around you.”
The words slipped out during a quiet November 2025 interview, almost a whisper, as she traced René’s face in a framed photo from their 1994 wedding.
Since his death in 2016, the losses have come in waves: her brother Daniel eight days later, her mother Thérèse in 2020, her musical soulmates Burt Bacharach and Quincy Jones in recent years. Each goodbye carves another hollow space. “I used to have so many people to call,” she said, voice trembling. “Now the phone is too quiet.”
Stiff Person Syndrome has already taken her ability to sing the way she once did, and some nights the fear is bigger than the disease.
She worries most about her sons—René-Charles, 24, and the twins Eddy and Nelson, 15—growing up in a world without their mother’s arms around them. “René promised them I would always be here,” she confessed, tears falling freely. “I promised him I would fight. But some nights I wake up gasping, terrified there won’t be enough mornings left to keep that promise.”
Grief and illness have become twin shadows she cannot outrun, yet she refuses to let them dim the light.
She still sings softly to the boys at night, records lullabies for the days she might not be here, and keeps René’s jacket hanging in the hallway so they can bury their faces in it when they need their father. “Love doesn’t die,” she says. “It just changes address.”
Every milestone now feels borrowed.
Birthdays, holidays, the twins’ upcoming high-school graduation—she counts them like rosary beads, grateful and terrified at once. “I bargain with God every day,” she admitted. “Give me one more Christmas, one more hug, one more chance to hear them laugh at my terrible jokes.”
There is no dramatic acceptance, only the daily act of choosing courage.
She walks the long hallway lined with platinum records, touches René’s star on the Walk of Fame when she visits Los Angeles, and sings fragments of “My Heart Will Go On” in the shower just to prove her voice is still there, even if it’s softer now. “I don’t fear dying,” she said finally. “I fear my children feeling alone. So I keep living louder than the fear.”
Céline Dion is not fading into silence.
She is singing through the ache,
turning every remaining breath into a love letter
to the three boys who need her
and the man who waits for her
somewhere beyond the last note.
And when her final curtain falls,
the world will still hear her,
because a mother’s love
is the one song
that never ends.
