Glen Campbell’s Wife Says Humor Keeps Their Spirits Up During Alzheimer’s Battle
Glen Campbell's legendary career has been cut short by his battle with Alzheimer's, but life is not all dark for the country icon.
In a new interview, his wife, Kim, says they use humor to try to see the bright side of things. "It gets us through every day," she says in the clip above.
"Even today -- he tries to tell us a joke, and he has a real hard time communicating now. His sentences are made up of unrelated words," she continues of Glen, "But he's trying to tell us a joke, and it doesn't make any sense to us, but he will laugh and laugh and laugh, and then we laugh at him. And then that makes him happy that he made us laugh. So we're still using humor to get through the tragedy of it all."
Campbell was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 2011. His struggle with the mounting effects of the disease was captured in the documentary 'Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me,' for which a camera crew followed him around during his farewell tour.
The singer's final song, 'I'm Not Gonna Miss You,' appears on the soundtrack to that film. The poignant track looks back on his life and everything that his disease is slowly taking away from him. It has been nominated for Best Country Song and Best Song Written for Visual Media in the 2015 Grammy Awards and also scored an Oscar nod for Best Original Song. As a tribute to Campbell, Tim McGraw will perform the song during the Academy Awards.
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