Céline Dion is worth an Olympiad

By Barbara Anderson

"I feel like I'm being strangled. They squeeze my larynx and my voice doesn't come out." Celine Dion explained to journalist Hoda Kotb in an interview on NBC what it meant to live with Stiff Person syndrome and how it changed her life. It is an autoimmune neurological disease that paralyzes different parts of the body with spasms. Many patients lose mobility permanently, as well as their ability to communicate and there are cases of progressive memory loss. In her case it started in her larynx, then her hands, her legs, her thorax...

Celine Dion showed her vulnerability, she did not hide the enormous shock of not being who you were, she changed her high fashion looks for pants and gowns and without makeup she showed her dark circles, her anguish and her eyes sunken by pain.

Standing at the waist of the Eiffel Tower, she enervated the skin of millions of people who listened to her sing the Hymn of Love. But there was no deception, no posturing, no haughtiness in her gaze. She was being the most honest of all the versions of Celine that inhabit and inhabited her.