Just months after revealing that her husband is too weak to eat on his own, Celine Dion has acknowledged that his final wish is to die in her arms.
Dion’s husband René Angélil has been battling throat cancer for over a year. His illness grew so serious that Dion had to cancel an extended portion of her multimillion dollar residency at Las Vegas’ Caesar’s Palace in order to help care for him.
Now, though the disease is terminal, Angélil’s condition has stabilized such that he’s moved back into their Las Vegas home, meaning Dion is ready to return to the stage. She’ll give her first concert in months on Thursday, August 27th, and acknowledged in a new interview that the show “will be fragile.”
“There will be moments,” Dion said. “Of emptiness, laughter, awkwardness, tearing up. But that’s the point of coming back—otherwise, I just release an album.”
As for the time she’s spent with Angélil, Dion was unusually and sometimes painfully frank in the interview, sharing some of her tenderest exchanges with the man she calls “the only boyfriend I’ve ever had”:
Sometimes he just wants me to enter into a different place with him….I’ll say, ‘You’re scared? I understand. Talk to me about it.’ And René says to me, ‘I want to die in your arms.’ OK, fine, I’ll be there, you’ll die in my arms….When you see someone who is fighting so hard, it has a big impact on you. You have two choices. You look at your husband who’s very sick and you can’t help, and it kills you. Or you look at your husband that’s sick and you say, ‘I got you. I got it. I’m here. It’s going to be just fine.’
Doctors have been inconclusive when asked how much longer Angélil has. Says Dion, “They say they don’t know.”
(Photo credits: Celine Dion via WENN, Facebook)
